


Paper Dolls

by de_la_cruz87



Category: 13 Reasons Why (TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Best Friends, Canon Compliant, Childhood Friends, Childhood Trauma, Friendship, Gen, future setting, group project, will add tags and characters as they come up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:55:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 67,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27807904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de_la_cruz87/pseuds/de_la_cruz87
Summary: November 2021: Sheri and Chloe return to Evergreen to reconnect and lay the ghosts of old friendships to rest.
Relationships: Justin Foley & Sheri Holland, Montgomery de la Cruz & Chloe Rice
Comments: 93
Kudos: 27





	1. Sheri

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More than three years after leaving, Sheri begins the long trip home.

**November 2021**

It was a relief to get on the bus.

The air inside was thick and hot and tasted the way that the inside of an old refrigerator smelled, and the seats gave off an aroma of a suspiciously strong mixture of vinegar and ammonia, with a sweet low note of old vomit, but it beat the bus station by a mile. 

Sheri was used to bad smells, and identifying them.

She could guess how long a person had been smoking, how many packets a day, and sometimes even the brand, from the way that their furniture smelled. 

She knew the smell of a mattress soaked in gasoline and set alight, a leg of ham left in a chest freezer with the power turned off for three months, diapers and used sanitary pads tossed into the unkempt lawn to bake in the summer heat, and petrified rats crushed beneath a falling stack of thirteen-year-old newspapers and uncovered six years post mortem. 

She could tell the difference between the odour of a dead cat, a dead dog, and a dead person.

None of it smelled quite as offensive as the inside of the Orlando bus station.

After she purchased her ticket, Sheri bought two coffees from the bored teenager working at the kiosk, dropped her change into the tip jar, and went to wait outside. She sat on the pavement with the homeless man who was panhandling by the entrance with an upturned baseball cap and a handwritten sign on a scrap of cardboard, a tattered duffel bag overflowing with weathered clothes slumped beside him. He accepted the coffee with a toothy smile, and when she unzipped her backpack to retrieve the snacks she had packed, he gladly helped himself to some crackers and cheese, but declined the carrot sticks, and cast a dubious sideways look at the tub of dip she offered. 

“Why’s it pink?”

Sheri smiled, dipping a carrot stick.

“It’s Egyptian Beetroot.”

He made face, and stuck to the crackers and cheese, slurping his coffee noisily through the tiny hole in the plastic lid. The second and third fingers of his right hand were missing, severed at the second knuckle. 

When Sheri and her father had arrived in Florida after her aunt’s diagnosis, the first thing they found out was, actually, she had been unwell for some time. It showed in her single storey ranch-style home, the windows thick with grime, the counters, tables and surfaces heavy with dust, the tiles and carpets grubby, and the gardens unkempt. She hadn’t had the energy to look after herself for months, let alone her property. Stacks of mail were piled on the sideboard by the front door, and bags of garbage collected on the patio by the back door – as far as she had the energy to take them, anymore. 

The second thing they found out, when they went with her to her to see her oncologist the following morning, was that the cancer wasn’t only in her liver. It was also in her right lung, and the bones of her hips, as well as her lymph nodes. 

The doctor gave them an estimate of six months.

The cancer was already eating her alive, and she didn’t want radiation doing the same thing, no matter how desperately Sheri’s father – her younger brother – begged her to reconsider. 

Sheri thought she understood. 

Those five months in juvenile detention had given her a new perspective on making the most of the time she had. 

They tried to make her comfortable. While her father cooked healthy meals loaded with super foods and vitamins, researched natural supplements and drove his sister to the medicinal cannabis store to have her prescription filled, Sheri cleaned. When she wasn’t at school, she scrubbed the windows and floors, vacuumed the carpets, and dragged the trash out to the curb. Then she filled more garbage bags with all of the mail and food packaging and household waste – used toilet rolls and tissue boxes and empty bottles of shampoo – that her aunt hadn’t had the energy to deal with, and dragged those out with the others. She mowed the lawn, weeded the garden beds, bleached the bathrooms and laundered every piece of clothing and bedding her aunt owned. She opened the windows and doors, letting light and fresh air pour through the house for the first time in months. 

Once Peach was cleared to fly, they travelled to the airport together to collect her, and laughed as they watched the luggage cart trundle across the tarmac toward the terminal with a single large crate on the back, the 100-pound Cane Corso standing with her large paws spread to each corner of her enclosure, her face split with a wide grin while her cheeks flapped in the breeze. 

In the evenings, while her father cooked black rice and steamed greens to serve with healthy, fatty fish like salmon, mackerel and trout, Sheri sat on the steps of the front porch with her aunt and Peach, and smoked a joint. 

“I want to start making up boxes for Goodwill,” her aunt said, one night, while Sheri worked on her Physics homework and moths battered their fragile bodies against the porch light overhead. “Someone else should get use out of all these things”

And then, a week later, with the scent of trout wafting through the screen door from the kitchen and Peach snoring at their feet – “I need to update my will – make sure the government doesn’t get any of my shit.”

And a few weeks after that, as she flicked her lighter and drew on the joint to breathe life into the ember. “I’m going to sell my car.” She raised a pre-emptively dismissive hand, anticipating Sheri’s protest as she added, “I want to put the money in your college fund.”

“Auntie,” Sheri shook her head, despite the irritated look it earned her, resting her elbows on the open government studies text book in her lap. “I can’t let you do that. I qualify for loans. And once I start freshman year, I’ll find a job that fits around my schedule-“

“Tsk,” her aunt hissed through her teeth, cutting her off. A smile dimpled her cheek, but her tone was solid and inflexible. “You gonna say ‘no’ to a dying lady?”

Sheri helped her with everything she asked. 

Three months after they had arrived, her abdomen swelling beneath her clothes and the whites of her eyes stained yellow, she passed Sheri the joint and blew a smoke ring toward the pinprick stars sprinkled overhead before saying, “I’m going to see a _mambo_. Want to come?”

The woman worked out of the back room of a house on a swampy backroad that looked like it belonged in a fairy-tale – turquoise weatherboard and white trimming, a broad porch with an ancient swing, and a stained-glass window in the front door depicting three white lilies. Sheri thought it looked as appropriate a home for a witch as any.

The woman wore her hair in locks half-bundled in a scarf, the rest falling to sweep at the waist of her dress, and her hands were inked with delicate tattoos of symbols and sigils. The room where she worked was crowded with clusters of religious icons and figurines, bottles plugged with candles and strips of cloth, shelves and hooks heavy with beads and necklaces, pots and jars. The woman asked for the tribute they had been instructed to bring – something pretty – for Erzulie, the vain and flighty _loa_ , who protected women and raged against the injustices they faced, and who they would ask to protect her aunt from the Baron while the woman worked to ease her pain. 

The woman had been clear – she could not heal the cancer, and the Baron would come eventually, and take what was his. But in the meantime, she would do what she could to bring her aunt comfort. 

Sheri slipped the emerald and pearl brooch that her aunt had selected from the jewellery box she had inherited from Sheri’s great-grandmother from her pocket, and handed it to her aunt. The air in the room felt hot and oppressive, and as she watched her aunt clasp her hands around the brooch, her frail fingers thinner than they had ever been, she backed out of the room, and closed the door behind her. 

Ezrulie’s favourite tributes were things that were pretty and sweet – jewellery, cakes, perfume and liqueurs. For the time that she could manage it, Sheri helped her aunt every Tuesday to make her way down to the little shrine of stones, painted with nail varnish in shades of blue, green and red, set amongst the trees that lined the creek at the end of her street. Sometimes, Peach would lumber after them, but most of the time, she preferred sleeping on the porch, unimpressed with the Florida humidity. At the shrine, her aunt would leave an earring or a charm, or sometimes a miniature bottle of rum. When Sheri baked, she set aside a cupcake or muffin to be offered. Her aunt smiled and said that she always felt better afterwards. Sheri thought that probably had more to do with the fresh air than any _loa_ and their penchant for _Aqua de Florida_ , but she wasn’t willing to stop, just in case.

“I mean, I don’t believe in it,” Sheri said, glancing up from her Spanish homework to where her phone was propped against the wall by the study desk in the little guest bedroom she slept in. “But I’m also scared not to, you know?”

Justin’s laugh on the other end of the line was lighter than she thought she had ever heard it before. 

“No, I get it,” he reassured her. “My mom used to have a lucky penny. Wouldn’t have even given it to a dealer if it meant the difference between scoring and going home with nothing.” Despite the brutal admission, he grinned brightly, and the camera shifted away from where he was sitting on his bed in a brown Monet’s t-shirt and swinging across the room to Clay, who stepped out of the outhouse bathroom in nothing but a pair of pale blue cotton boxer shorts, towelling his damp hair. “Hey Clay, Sheri says ‘hi’.”

Sheri giggled as Clay flushed with embarrassment so immediately and thoroughly that even his chest went red, and he fumbled to cover himself with the towel in his hands. 

“And a towel is-?” she prompted, with a dimpled smile, while Clay spluttered and cursed in the background.

“Female,” Justin guessed with a grin, swinging the camera back around to give Clay a modicum of privacy, and her a front row seat to the famous Foley smile. “ _la toalla_.”

“Very good,” Sheri chuckled, then sat forward, propping her chin in her hand. Beneath the desk, Peach lay on top of her bare feet, her substantial weight causing Sheri’s toes to prickle with pins and needles. “How did your mom figure that penny was so lucky?”

Justin shrugged, shaking his head. 

“I don’t know,” he muttered, leaning back against the wall beneath a _Fast and the Furious_ movie poster. “It wasn’t, really. She found it on the street. There wasn’t anything special about it.” He met her gaze across the video call, his eyes startlingly clear and blue. “I guess she just needed to believe there was.”

Sheri spent the next week watching the pavement as she walked – from the bus stop to school, outside the grocery store and the library, as she accompanied her aunt down the street. She found a penny in a crack in the sidewalk outside of the house on a Saturday afternoon as she pushed the lawnmower up and down the front yard. After that, she carried it in her pocket everywhere she went. 

It seemed silly – maybe even sillier than the orange and cranberry muffin that she wrapped in a napkin and handed to her aunt before walking her down to the little shrine by the creek – but she did it. 

Because her aunt held on.

She outlasted the six-month estimate, and then another six months after that. 

Almost a year to the day since they had arrived in Florida, her aunt sent her to her bedroom to retrieve a tiny crystal bottle of heavy floral perfume, and when Sheri came back, she was slumped in an armchair, barely able to catch her breath. 

It was a fast decline from there. 

Within weeks, she progressed from a wheelchair, to a hospital bed, and then a hospice placement. Sheri offered to keep taking tributes to Ezrulie, but her aunt shook her head gently.

“It’s a solitary thing, worship,” she said, her voice quiet and rough like shifting papers. “And she’s done about as much as she can for me, now.”

Sheri held on to the lucky penny, anyway. It didn’t feel so lucky, but she held it tightly in her hand when she sat by her aunt’s bed in the hospice, squeezing it until it left an impression of blood blisters in her palm. 

When Justin called her over Skype not long after she got home from visiting, she was surprised when she connected the call, and saw Clay.

“Hey, Clay,” she smiled, brushing back her surprise to the place deep inside her chest where she pressed down the sharp and icy sorrow of her aunt’s crumbling health. “How was prom?”

She managed to cling to control with her fingernails through dinner, both her and her father pushing around forkfuls of meatloaf and collard greens on their plates, and when he offered to clean the dishes so that she could make a start on her homework, Sheri gently pressed the door of the guest room closed, switched off the light, and sank to the floor, tears flooding down her cheeks. 

The day of Justin’s funeral, Sheri’s aunt was released from the hospice to die at home. 

While her father went to collect his sister, Sheri sat on the edge of the bed that they had made up for her in the living room, where the window poured in sunlight and the scent of the jasmine plants growing in the garden bed at the base of the porch, its coiling tendrils entwined with the railings and dotted with delicate white blooms. The once overgrown yard was now neat and green, a welcoming sanctuary to the birds that came to land on the feeder that they hung from the guttering. She pinned her mobile phone between her shoulder and ear as she adjusted the hospital corner folded at the foot of the mattress. 

“If I order flowers to be delivered to your mom’s, could you lay them at the headstone?”

“Of course,” Chloe agreed, her voice distant over Bluetooth and mingled with the punk song playing softly over her car stereo. “I know the Jensens asked if there was anything you wanted said at the ceremony.” She hesitated, or maybe needed a moment, her voice tight when she spoke again. “I could read it for you, if you like.”

Sheri bit her lip, swallowing hard against the prickle in her throat.

“I spoke to him, on the phone, before…” she trailed off, her chest constricting, and gripped the edge of the bed as if it were her own resolve, digging her fingernails into the sheets. Peach, sitting in the doorway, watched her, her eyebrows twitching with concern. “I said everything I wanted to, to him.” She swallowed, hard, and looked over her shoulder at the musical trill that sounded outside the window. A colourful painted bunting perched on the feeder. “But there is something else you could do. Something you could leave, with the flowers.”

“Of course,” Chloe agreed. “Anything.”

The night after her aunt arrived home, Sheri slipped into the kitchen for a glass of water a few minutes before three in the morning, and stopped by the living room to check on her aunt on her way back to her room. She found her awake, her eyes glassy and distant, roaming calmly across the room. She had the appearance of a wraith, painfully thin with yellowed skin stretched paper-thin over her skeleton, her body tiny and frail beneath the bright patchwork quilt that had been crocheted and sewn by Sheri’s grandmother. Peach was lying on the floorboards at the foot of the bed, but was not asleep. Quietly, Sheri moved to her bedside and, very gently, slipped her hand into her aunt’s.

“I had a dream,” the woman whispered, looking up at her, her gaze clouded and unfocused. “I met the Baron.” She smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “He was so beautiful.” 

Sheri squeezed her fingers gently with one hand, and brought the other to her own face, swiping at her cheeks with the heel of her palm to dash away the tears. 

“Well, then,” she said, wishing in that moment that she could have offered the brilliant reassurance that had been effortlessly encapsulated in every one of Justin’s smiles. “You’d better not keep him waiting, auntie.”

Sheri pressed the penny into her aunt’s hand – a gift for the Baron, to bid him to dig her grave, and allow her to rest in the ground in peace – and went to wake her father. 

They sat with her until she passed the following afternoon. 

Sheri started college in September. She used some of the money from the sale of her aunt’s car to purchase her textbooks. She had known that she wanted to study nursing since her freshman year of high school, but back then, she thought she wanted to be a midwife.

“I just like helping people,” she had told Ms Antilly during her career counselling meeting, shrugging her shoulders as she smiled. “And I love babies.”

Ms Antilly had beamed at her from the other side of the desk, nodding enthusiastically.

“Me, too!”

After spending weeks in the hospice, watching the people lying in the rooms and beds around her aunt pass from their lives with no family, no children, no one to care for them or about them, other than the hospice workers, Sheri thought that maybe she could do more good as a palliative care nurse, or perhaps working in a nursing home. 

She packed a couple of bags, and loaded them into the tray of her father’s truck. Peach sat in the back seat. It was a four hour drive from Orlando to Tallahassee, but he insisted that he wanted to take her, and make sure that she got settled into her dorm at Florida State. It wasn’t uncomfortable, exactly, but Sheri couldn’t help thinking of the last time they had driven like that, together – when he had taken her to the police station, to make the report that she should have made weeks earlier. 

She sat in the passenger seat, listening to the easy rock station he tuned the radio to, and squeezed the little crystal bottle of perfume in her palm.

“Greyhound bus one-one-one-zero, Orlando to Ocala, stopping at Gainesville, boarding at stand B.”

Sheri looked up at the announcement over the PA system, then smiled at the homeless man, who popped another cracker into his mouth on top of the half-chewed one already crusting his tongue.

“That’s me,” she said, pulling the strap of her backpack onto her shoulder. She raised her eyebrows at him, offering the tub of Egyptian Beetroot dip. “You sure you don’t want this?”

He just shook his head, taking a swig of coffee to wash down the crackers. Sheri popped the lid back onto the tub and tucked it into her backpack. She left the rest of the crackers and cheese with the man, and headed for stand B. 

The bus was only half-full, and Sheri had a row to herself. She took the window seat, and as the bus set off from the station, the air-conditioning sputtered, and she thought that she could identify the brand of the heavy-duty cleaner that they used to disinfect the system. 

Industrial cleaning was an industry that operated all hours and paid a touch over minimum wage, so it suited Sheri fine. She could more or less pick her roster, accepting and declining once-off jobs as they fit with her study schedule. Mostly, she worked on teams cleaning abandoned rental properties and hoarder’s homes, stamping in and out wearing protective coveralls, hauling wheelbarrow loads of unopened appliances, magazine back catalogues, dirty dishes discarded because the kitchen was no longer accessible, let alone the dishwasher, and teetering piles of clothes to the dumpsters that were delivered out front. Sometimes, they cleaned drug dens and junkie’s homes, other times, houses belonging to deceased estates with no living relatives. Occasionally, those people with no living relatives had died in the house.

They weren’t supposed to take anything from the houses, but some of the other workers did – if they found cash, or small valuables like jewellery or watches, electronics or bottles of prescription pills, they would tuck it into their pocket and call it a Christmas Bonus. 

Sheri dumped everything, even though it made her sad. 

The whole of a human life, thrown into a dumpster. 

Every week, she made a repayment on her student loan. 

After her first year of study, Sheri met with the career counsellor on campus. It had been twelve whole months – of classes and lectures, of sharing a dorm room with a studious exchange student from Trinidad, who didn’t go to parties but bought ADHD medication from one of the boys on campus who sold pills so that she could stay up all night cramming for exams, of video-calling her dad every Thursday night to make sure that he was eating and drinking enough water, to say ‘hello’ to Peach, and to hear how his latest date with the elementary school teacher who lived on the next block had gone.

Of living, day after day, without her aunt. 

Without Justin.

Without people she had known, and cared about, and who might still be alive, if it had not been for her. 

“I guess I just feel like I might not be doing the right thing,” she explained, sitting in the rigid wood-framed chair facing the counsellor’s desk, the upholstered seat far too stiff to be comfortable for any amount of time. “I want to do something with my life that helps people, and gives back…” She shook her head, helplessly. “I guess it just feels sort of… defeatist? To wait until the end of their lives to do that.”

The counsellor shrugged his shoulders reasonably, his hands folded on the desk in front of him.

“So, have you thought about another specialisation?” he suggested, swivelling in his desk chair toward his computer. “If you want to work with young people, or people in crisis, there are a lot of options available to you.”

He printed off some information for her about paediatrics, community, emergency, and sexual health nursing. She didn’t make a decision, right away, but she left his office feeling a little less lost. 

The bus route from Florida to California would take two days, with more than ten stops per day along the way, but it was what she could afford, and Sheri figured she could use the time to study. She had planned the route to allow for delays and, all going well, would arrive the day before she needed to be there. 

“I’ll be home for Thanksgiving,” she promised her father over dinner, spending the night with him and Peach before she was due to leave the following day. “I promise.”

He nodded, scooping up a forkful of salmon. From a photograph in a gilded silver frame on the sideboard behind him, her aunt beamed, her skin lit to warmth by the sun where she sat on the porch steps. 

“OK,” he agreed, popping the salmon in his mouth, while Peach watched intently from the doorway, banned from the dining room because of the amount of drool she left on the floorboards when they ate. “Because I’ve invited Miss Mendoza, and she’s just dying to meet you.”

Sheri thought it was kind of sweet – in a dorky, dad way – that he referred to his lady friend by the same name her third-grade students used. 

When she wasn’t reading from her textbooks, taking notes or listening to online lectures, Sheri watched out the window as the landscape passed her by. Florida gave way to Georgia, then Alabama, and Mississippi, which they passed through overnight, Sheri tucking a rolled up sweater between her head and the window to sleep. She woke in Louisiana, and listened to a podcast by Correctional Nursing Today about sex trafficking of women offenders. When they changed busses in Dallas at midday, she double checked the front pocket of her backpack, making certain that the little bottle of perfume was still secured where she had placed it, before taking her seat. 

The new bus smelled like a house she had cleaned after its owner had been sectioned and committed to a psychiatric facility. When they had arrived, there had been writing scrawled on almost every wall, nothing at all left in the kitchen – every piece of furniture, dismantled cabinet and appliance relocated to the back lawn - and the carpet was soaked in solvent and urine. By the time they had left, it had smelled a lot like the bus – like bleach, and the slightest hint of something rotten that they hadn’t been able to find, and had to assume was either stuck beneath the house, or hidden inside the walls.

They arrived in New Mexico the following morning, after hours and hours of fields and valleys, farms and towns, and then, later that afternoon, crossed the border into California. 

The bus would only take her as far as a major city, so Sheri disembarked at the final station, hauling her backpack onto her shoulders, and tucking her phone, wrapped with the cord of her earbuds, into the pocket of her jeans. Her legs felt stiff after sitting for so long, and her first stop was the bathroom. Sitting in the stall, she tried not to nod off, motion sickness from days on the road rocking her soothingly, and took the opportunity to shuck off the t-shirt she had been wearing since Florida, bending to dig beneath the black slip dress and cardigan folded at the top of her backpack, for a fresh tee. After she changed and flushed, she went out to the sink, where she re-tied her ponytail, untended to and falling apart after two days, and cleaned her face and hands.

When she looked in the mirror, framed by the concrete walls and the metal sink in front of her, for a moment, it felt like she was back in her cell. 

Sheri closed her eyes, took a slow breath, and cursed, softly, when her phone vibrated in her pocket, startling her. She retrieved it, sliding the coiled cord up the screen to read the push notification.

**Chloe**  
_3 messages_

Sheri swiped with her thumb, expanding the notification.

_Hey._  
How’s the bus ride going?  
Thanks again for doing this 

Unsettled by the cobweb-cling of memory and exhausted from travelling two days and nine states by bus, Sheri thumbed the lock key, and slipped her phone into her pocket. She would respond once she had a bed to lie in for the night. 

The kiosk in the station was closed at this time of night, but there was a vending machine that dispensed coffee, and it was incredibly sweet and strong, but both of those suited Sheri just fine in the circumstances. She blew on the steaming beverage as she walked to the ticket booth, and smiled at the woman on the other side of the protective glass.

“Hi,” she said, setting down her coffee on the edge of the counter to dig in her backpack for her purse. “One ticket to Evergreen County, please.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the next fic!
> 
> Thank you so much to closetfascination and comfortwriter28 - your help and support and encouragement are invaluable to me writing in this fandom. If you aren't already reading their fics, I recommend checking out their profiles!
> 
> I feel like I should apologise to anyone who knows a single thing about vodou, because I don't, and all of the references are purely based on good ol' Google. 
> 
> This fic will follow an alternating POV structure, switching between Sheri and Chloe. In between the main chapters, I will be posting sets of drabbles or micro-scenes - little moments between the four main characters that fill in gaps in this fic and previous fics, and build on the friendships between the kids, but aren't big enough to support chapters on their own. 
> 
> I'm aiming for a weekly posting schedule so that I can post a set of Christmas-themed micro-scenes in time for the holidays :)
> 
> As always, this fic references both canon and my previous fics (Joyride, the Clubhouse, Dizzy, Kitana and Rodeo). 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and commenting!


	2. First Intermission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A set of three drabbles, plugging holes and building on the friendships established in canon and in my previous fics.

The laundromat smelled of floral fabric softener, clothes left damp too long, and burned coffee from the pot sitting by the window beneath the peeling soap-sud decals, a thick black sludge that didn’t look pourable, let alone drinkable, caked in the bottom.

Outside, rain pattered on the sidewalk and the street.

Sheri sat cross-legged on the tall wooden bench that ran along the middle of the narrow space, a Spanish textbook by her knee and her notebook open in her lap. Justin stood beside her, separating whites and colours. Aside from an elderly Vietnamese man, who dozed in a fold-out chair behind the counter by the entrance, the laundromat was empty. The space was filled with the rhythmic bass beat of Sheri’s Spotify playlist, and the rumble of a wash cycle as it churned the Liberty Tigers uniforms that Justin had bundled inside, handing over a fistful of coins to the man at the counter in exchange for two scoops of washing powder and one scoop of stain remover, which he applied carefully to the grass stains on his football uniform before loading them in.

“OK,” Sheri paused, reaching down to flick open the lock screen on her phone and read a text message. “Diego says thoughts are male, and ideas are female.” She looked down at her textbook. “So, _los pensamientos_. Thoughts. _La idea_. The idea.” She cocked an eyebrow at Justin. “Make sense?”

Justin added two of his mother’s work shirts, stitched with the name of the diner where she was waitressing, to the whites pile, and scrunched his nose with a frown.

“Not really,” he said, placing a couple of food-stained aprons in the colours pile, checking the pockets for notepads or loose change before he set them down. “How do they figure that? Guys can think shit, but we can’t have ideas?”

Sheri offered a teasing smile, a hint that the concept was not all that far-fetched, and Justin rolled his eyes as she laughed, looking again at her phone, and then consulting the text book.

“I don’t think it’s really about gender associations.” She ran her finger along the page. “See? Neckties are for guys, but you use the feminine ‘la’, _la corbata_.” She grinned, her cheek dimpling with amusement. “And makeup is masculine. _El maquillaje_.”

Justin snorted, tossing a pair of sports socks that perhaps used to be white but been stained to an unidentifiable shade of greenish-grey into the colours pile.

“OK, who the fuck came up with this language?” he asked, shaking his head as Sheri made notes in her exercise book, doodling little gender signs next to each phrase. “I thought Spanish was supposed to be easier to learn than English?”

“I think it’s more similar to French than English,” she said with a shrug, glancing down at her phone as it vibrated by her knee. “They’re romance languages.”

Watching her read the text message, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, Justin propped his elbows on the tabletop, raising a mischievous eyebrow at her.

“Oh, yeah?” he asked, grinning. “Diego romancing you with a bit of that Latin lover romance language over text?”

Sheri scoffed in mock affront and, to prove him wrong, turned the screen of her phone to show him the photo her father had sent of Peach, sprawled on her bed with her legs akimbo, her pregnant belly full and round. As Justin opened his mouth to concede, another text message notification skimmed across the screen, and Justin caught Diego’s name at the top of it before Sheri snatched the phone away, rolling her eyes.

“Shut up,” she muttered, shaking her head as he chuckled and turned to load the pile of whites into a machine. “We’re just going for a milkshake at Rosie’s.”

“ _Las malteadas_ ,” Justin offered, in a decidedly poor imitation of Diego’s accent, prompting a helpless giggle from Sheri as he began loading coins into the machine. “You gotta get the chocolate shake,” he said over his shoulder as he turned the dial to a wash cycle. “I know strawberry is your favourite, but trust me. The chocolate is fucking amazing.” He turned back to the table, counting the coins left in his palm, and then looked up, flashing a bright Foley grin. “And anyway, you can always make him get the strawberry and then ask for a sip so you can taste both.”

Sheri raised an eyebrow, nodding her head slowly.

“Well, what do you know,” she said with a teasing smile. “Boys can have ideas after all.”

~

By the time they reached the apartment block, the rain was belting down so hard that it was almost impossible to see through the windshield, the wipers sluicing water back and forth but unable to completely clear it at such volume. The inside of the glass fogged with the humidity clinging in the summer air, so that Monty had to turn the air-conditioning on full-blast or drive blind. Hauling his duffel bag out of the footwell as Monty pulled the Jeep into the puddle of dirty rainwater collecting against the curb, Justin glanced at the other boy, who sat silently behind the steering wheel, clothes soaked and hair dripping, his skin prickling with goose-bumps from the icy blast from the air-conditioning vents.

“I, uh-“ Justin bit his lip, wondering if it was a weird thing to admit to. “I still have those clothes. That I borrowed, when I stayed over.” Monty cut a sideways look at him, and Justin couldn’t quite tell if he was amused, disgusted, or indifferent. He lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “You can come up, if you want to change into something dry.”

Monty was silent for a moment, and Justin braced himself for a lewd and abrasive taunt about why he had kept the other boy’s clothes. It didn’t come. Monty didn’t say anything at all, but he did reach to turn the engine off and pull the keys from the ignition, and Justin figured that was more or less an answer.

They were both wet enough that running wasn’t worth it, and after trotting along the footpath to the building, they climbed the steep staircase to the apartment with rainwater dripping from their hair and trickling down the back of their necks. Monty glanced at the poorly spelled white power graffiti scrawled on the walls by bored kids, eyeing a crooked swastika spray-painted in hot pink, but didn’t say anything.

Justin wondered if he should apologise for it, or explain that it had been reported to the real estate company and they were waiting for them to send a contactor around to clean it off, but that seemed like a strange thing to do, so he kept his mouth shut, and unlocked the door.

As he stepped inside, Justin assessed the apartment with the focus and care of a bomb technician. The television was on, a Wendy Williams talk-show re-run turned up to deafening volume, which meant his mother was home, and strung out between hits. The hallway smelled like unwashed clothes, dirty socks and the kind of body spray a middle-school boy would use to substitute taking a shower, so Seth was somewhere nearby. Beneath the cackling laughter from the television, he thought he could hear arguing, but it was impossible to tell if it was coming from behind the French doors that led to his mother’s room, or closer to the bathroom at the end of the hall.

“Just, uh, just wait in there,” Justin said as he waved a hand toward the kitchen. He waited until Monty moved in that direction - the other boy’s expression unreadable as his gaze roamed over the dirty carpet and the grubby couch, the hole in the wall beneath the colourful art print that his mother had picked up from a thrift store where his elbow had gone through the plaster in a scuffle with Seth, and the careless collection of beer bottles, ashtrays and two dirty, well-used bongs on the coffee table - then headed deeper into the apartment.

The shouting was definitely coming from this end – both his mother and Seth’s voices just scarcely muffled on the other side of the closed bathroom door – and it seemed to oscillate between snapping and cursing at each other over the rent, and passionate grunting and shrieking that made his throat feel tight. Throwing things out of the way, Justin tried to ignore the sounds as he searched his room for the t-shirt and shorts he had borrowed from Monty during summer break, leaving each drawer open as he moved on to the next. He found the shorts, folded on top of a pair of his own, but the tee, unmistakably stamped with Monty’s father’s company name in heavy white letters, was missing.

Justin cursed, casting his eyes about the room. Monty was going to be pissed if he had dragged him all the way up here, in the rain, for clothes he couldn’t find. He supposed he should just add it to the list of everything that could possibly go wrong, and had – Zach’s dad back in the hospital, the lost basketball game, the party at Bryce’s he didn’t want to go to, sitting in the passenger seat of the Jeep and trying to pretend he couldn’t hear Monty and his dad arguing about whether or not he was Monty’s boyfriend, Seth and his mother screaming in the bathroom next door as they got done fucking or fighting or both, and now this.

He did another sweep of the room – the desk, under the bed, behind the bedside cabinet – but came up empty-handed, and went to tell Monty.

“Hey, man. I-“

Justin cut himself off, coming to a stop in the doorway with the shorts clutched in one hand.

Monty was standing in the corner of the kitchen, leaning against the counter-top with a guarded expression and looking at the fridge, where Seth was bent double and rifling through the contents. After a moment, Seth turned to face Justin, swinging the door closed with a harsh rattle. He had a can of cheap beer in one hand, and was wearing only a stained pair of cotton boxer shorts with a damp patch at the crotch, and Monty’s _de la Cruz Contracting_ t-shirt. He looked at Justin’s rain-soaked basketball uniform and cocked an eyebrow.

“You lose or what?” he asked with a dirty leer. Without waiting for a response, he headed for the living room, flopping onto the couch and propping his unwashed feet up on the coffee table amongst the garbage scattered there as he opened the can of beer with a pop and a hiss.

Justin clenched his jaw, his grip tightening on the fabric in his hand as he attempted to press down the flush of humiliation he could feel burning his cheeks, and looked at Monty. The other boy was looking at the strip of photo-booth photographs pinned to the side of the fridge, the edges worn soft and a little torn with age, six-year-old Justin and his mother grinning in each little square.

“Diego and Luke went to Jeff’s,” he said, his gaze shifting to Justin. “I think Sheri and Chloe are there as well. And it’s my turn this week, so-” He raised an eyebrow as Seth changed the television channel to a news program airing a press conference with President Trump, broadcasting his voice through the apartment. “Wanna go?”

Justin bit the inside of his lip, glanced down at the dirty linoleum, and nodded.

“Yeah.”

~

Monty set his skateboard to one side and crouched down to take her sneakered foot in both hands, pushing it back along the board until her toes were behind the bolts securing the front trucks, and angling it toward the nose.

“Like that,” he said, and gestured for her to place her other foot on the board. Chloe hesitated, uncertain, and he reached up to take her hand, guiding it to his shoulder, where she gripped for balance as he adjusted her other foot on the tail of the board. “So-“

“Hey, fag.” One of the teenagers who loitered around the skate park, smoking and swearing and guffawing with his friends, skated by them close enough that Chloe tightened her grip on Monty’s shoulders, frightened the older boy was going to collide with them as he roared past, leering. “Your mom buy you _skateboarding Barbie_ for your birthday?”

Chloe looked down at her Barbie pink elbow and knee pads, cheeks flaring with embarrassment, and found Monty looking up at her, expression calm.

“So,” he repeated, as if the older boy hadn’t spoken. “You’re kind of gonna do an ollie, but this foot-“ He tapped the laces of her front foot, “-is gonna slide this way, and you’re gonna use the edge of your foot to flick the board here.” Chloe watched his hands as he indicated directions and contact points. The knuckles of his right hand were grazed and scabbed from climbing the tree in her front yard the weekend before. “Just remember you gotta kick up and out. Not down.” He looked up at her to make certain she understood. “You kick down, your foot will go under the board.”

Chloe nodded, biting her lip to press down a flinch as the teenage boy flew by them again, grinding loudly on the low rail behind her. Monty took her hands and held her steady as he stood.

“Hey,” he said, as he released his grasp on her fingers, allowing her to let go as she was comfortable, watching her wobble for balance. “Fuck that guy. He’s trying to scare a couple of second graders.” He glanced over his shoulder at the teenage boy, who pulled a basic ollie for his friends, a small, loose rabble, over by the half pipe. Monty grinned as he looked back at Chloe, eyes flashing with razor-edged amusement. “Imagine how tiny his dick must be.”

Chloe choked on a giggle and tried not to imagine it as Monty stepped back, giving her space to attempt her first kickflip.

She kicked down.

Her foot went under the board, and the other landed on the trucks, slipping immediately and tipping her balance. Monty darted in her direction, but grasped at air as she hit the pavement, pitching forwards on her hands and knees. She managed to catch herself before her chin hit the ground, and for a panicked moment, her lungs felt as if they had been packed with cement, as shock stole her breath.

Then there was pain.

And laughter.

“You’re OK,” Monty said as he helped her up, although his expression didn’t reflect the reassuring certainty in his voice when he looked down at her. The heels of her hands were cross-hatched with grazing and burned with a sharp sting, while her shins began to ooze blood, crisscrossed with the shallow screed pattern of the pavement underfoot. Monty squeezed her fingers, his eyes dark with concern, and Chloe nodded quickly. She was OK.

Over by the half-pipe, the older boys laughed uproariously, leaning on one another for support as they chortled.

“Nice one,” the teenage boy shouted, looping the park back in their direction as Monty bent to pick up the two skateboards. He handed Chloe hers, waiting to make sure that her shaking fingers held it firmly before letting it go, and gripped his own board by the tail in both hands. The boy swerved close, grinning crookedly. “Next you should try a-“

His suggestion was cut off by Monty’s board swinging like a trebuchet directly into his face.

The boy tumbled to the pavement in a tangle of limbs, cursing and clutching his face, as his board rolled away, tracking through the splatter of blood that had arced across the cement. Across the skatepark, the pack of boys shouted in protest. Chloe gasped, surprise colliding with the shock of falling and the pain of hitting the pavement. Her ears were ringing with it when Monty turned to her, his eyes feral and bright.

“Can you run?”

Chloe nodded, and realised that she was grinning when Monty smiled back at her.

As the wailing boy’s friends set across the park toward them, she took Monty’s hand to make sure that they would not be separated, and they ran.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was the first half-chapter that will intersect the main story throughout this fic. The next set of scenes will be Christmas themed, and posted in the week leading up to Christmas day :)
> 
> Thank you to closetfascination and comfortwriter28 for your help and support!
> 
> Each of these mini-scenes connects with scenes or things that have been mentioned in my previous fics. If anything doesn't make sense, I apologise - do please let me know :)
> 
> The next chapter has been drafted (after a few false starts!) and will be posted next week. This one will alternate to be told from Chloe's POV.
> 
> Thank you for reading and commenting.


	3. Chloe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chloe prepares to reconnect with Sheri

**November 2021**

The things that Chloe missed were not what she expected.

The smell of the pine trees that bracketed the picnic tables at the edge of the tennis courts, and the softness of the needles that they shed underfoot.

The tiny love-heart, no bigger than her thumbnail, that she had scratched into the lip of the table on the back quad, years of work and refinement, using the edge of her nail file and the point of her compass and the key to her Volkswagen.

The reflection of the sun on the surface of the waterhole, flickering like a thousand golden leaves.

The sound of Amelia sitting next to her at the kitchen table at breakfast, crunching cereal loudly – because she never poured enough milk in the bowl – and the tiny vibration of her bouncing her heel on the linoleum, ceaselessly brimming with energy. 

The crack in the sidewalk outside of the house with the jasmine tendrils coiled around the fence, and the way that the wheels of their skateboards would bump over it, a unique and imperfect four-note chord.

Her mother’s SUV in the driveway when she rounded the corner on her way home, even those times when she had forgotten and left the headlights on. Maybe especially those.

The sandpaper roughness of the cement beneath her jeans as she slipped down from the lip of the bowl at the skatepark and slid to lie beside the stormwater drain at its base, the smell of rotting leaf litter seeping from the grill, and the sky specked with stars overhead. 

The clean citrus scent of the washing powder his mother used, the sound of a football game interspersed with muttered cursing in Spanish and the clink of empty beer bottles bumping shoulders, the way that the thin, milky light of the moon through the window cast the room in soft edges, and the steady sound of his heart like a drumbeat beneath her ear. 

“Is that your boyfriend?”

Her first roommate, a willowy brunette named Vienna – Chloe remembered the tone that the introduction had been offered in, but not her surname - sat on her bed in a silk kimono-style robe, printed with blossoms and swallows, her freshly blow-dried hair tumbling in waves about her shoulders. She lifted her chin to indicate what she meant, as her hands wound the cord of her hairdryer around the grip. 

“He’s a cutie.”

Chloe followed the line of her gaze to the photograph, and was both proud and disappointed that her expression didn’t flinch.

“No,” she said. “He’s not.”

Or rather, wasn’t.

Ever.

Either of those things. 

Chloe arrived on campus two days after Vienna, who had been moved in by her parents, and what Chloe assumed had to have been the equivalent of a team of decorators who normally worked staging photoshoots for home and style magazines. Her side of the room was replete with a fluffy white embroidered bedspread and a perfectly arranged collection of matching throw cushions, clothes folded Kondo-style into the chest of drawers she had been issued, the top crowded with makeup and hair products and jewellery and five different species of succulents all in matching white pots. A collection of white and cream coloured dreamcatchers adorned with beads and feathers were pinned to the wall, the palette matched to the woven rug laid upon the floorboards at the side of her bed, and the curtains hanging in the window over her bed had been draped with twinkling fairy lights. 

It was an arrangement lifted directly from a Pinterest board, perfectly curated for Instagram selfies of _#collegelife_.

The first thing that Chloe brought up from her car was the skateboard. 

Her mother and Tom had wanted to drive her out to San Diego in Tom’s truck and help her get settled, but Chloe wanted to do it herself, and they settled somewhere in the middle, agreeing to her borrowing Tom’s screwdriver set and his hammer-drill. He showed her how to use it, practicing on scrap wood stretched between the lawn chairs in the backyard, and took her to the hardware store to buy screws, hooks and wall plugs. He showed her how to trace guide marks before drilling, and they downloaded a spirit level app onto her phone.

“When you come down for Thanksgiving, I can show you how to repair the holes and plaster everything up nice for the next person,” Tom said, brushing sawdust from his moustache. He shrugged awkwardly, as bashful and hesitant as ever. “Or your mom and I could come up, and I can do it for you.”

Chloe smiled, lining up the drill bit with another practice guide mark.

“Thanks, Tom.”

The expression on Vienna’s face soured the moment that Chloe had bumped the battery pack into the base of the drill, and didn’t ease, despite that the drone of her hairdryer competed valiantly with the short bursts of noise from the drill as Chloe followed the two guide marks she had drawn in the screw-holes of the hook. The girl watched over her shoulder in the mirror mounted above her chest of drawers – the frame painted to match the cream and white theme of her décor - as Chloe used the butt of the drill as a makeshift hammer to knock in the wall plugs, then changed the drill bit and carefully secured the hook in place. 

“Do you even use that thing?” she asked, shutting off her hairdryer as Chloe hung the skateboard by the trucks, and sat back on the still-bare mattress, looking up at the wear on the grip tape. “Like, to skate?”

“I used to,” Chloe answered, smiling politely despite the way that the other girl’s eyebrow angled upward, unimpressed. “But not this one.” 

She turned back to the board, running her fingers over the ridges in the drill bit, a distraction to press back the urge to take the board back down and trace the edges of the stickers on the underside. It was too easy to lose herself in the patchwork of colourful motifs, to slip backwards and out of time as she pondered the meaning and memories attached to each one.

“Uh-huh,” Vienna muttered, and that was more or less the last thing either of them said to one another, other than that one question.

_Is that your boyfriend?_

The second thing that Chloe brought up, along with her quilt in the new floral cover that her mother had bought and washed and ironed before tucking her duvet inside for her and rolling it into a tidy bundle to pack into the trunk of the Volkswagen with her pillows and her suitcase and the box of textbooks and school supplies, was her photos. Back home, the night before she was due to set off, Chloe carefully unpinned each one from the wall of her bedroom, stacking them neatly and winding the length of twine into a tidy coil. In the dorm room, she repeated the process in reverse, pressing the pins into the plasterboard of the wall by her bed, and crisscrossing the twine between them in a delicate web. 

The photo that Vienna asked about what the first one that she hung, from the lowest thread, closest to her pillow, and it was the only one that she unpinned when she packed her duffel bag that morning.

“How long’s the drive down?” Myah asked, sitting on the floor between their beds and rearranging the clothes that Chloe had already packed to make room for a pair of shoes. 

Vienna lasted one semester into their Freshman year at the University of San Diego and then dropped out. Attending lectures and tutorials interfered too much with popping pills and drinking herself to blackout at local clubs that were more interested in whether or not she could pay the cover charge than checking her incredibly obvious fake ID. One afternoon, Chloe returned from back to back biological psychology and genetics lectures to find the other half of the room stripped of everything except for one of the dreamcatchers and all of the plants. 

She was dutifully watering the orphaned succulents, fuelled by an irrational obligation to keep them alive, when Myah arrived.

“Those don’t look so good,” she said, before even introducing herself, raising an eyebrow where she leaned against the doorframe, a backpack over one shoulder, a plaid patterned quilt rolled up under her arm, and an army surplus duffel bag at her feet. 

“Oh, um-“ Chloe bit her lip, tipping the last few drops from her water bottle into a struggling little pot of baby toes. “They’re not mine. Well-“ She shook her head, and smiled over her shoulder at the other girl. “I guess I kind of adopted them.” She shrugged. “I’m Chloe.”

“Myah,” the other girl offered, looking around the room at the room, her gaze lingering on the dreamcatcher for a moment before she returned her gaze to Chloe. “And you’re giving them too much water.”

Myah took over responsibility for the plants, after she got moved in.

She took down the abandoned dreamcatcher – pulling it apart to thread the beads and feathers onto the twine amongst Chloe’s photos – and replaced it with punk art and a poster-print tribute to the notorious RBG. Amongst the succulents, which thrived under her care, to the point that they re-potted cuttings in second-hand coffee mugs and chipped ceramic bowls from the thrift store and handed them out to other students, until the dorm was dotted with greenery – her side of the room was crowded with messy stacks of pamphlets and textbooks, cans of spray-paint and bundles of markers, thrift store jewellery and half-burned candles.

Myah was a Sociology major, and a self-described activist. She organised campaigns on campus to get students enrolled to vote, to protest the defunding of a local homeless shelter, and set up a safety-in-numbers volunteer program for female students to travel together when they were walking around campus at night. She made friends with the boys on the football and basketball teams to leverage their popularity for her causes. 

Chloe thought Myah was the most fearless person she had ever met.

She knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life, and who she wanted to be, and she never apologised for it. 

Chloe found it both inspiring and terrifying. 

“Just a couple of hours once I get on the highway,” Chloe said, as Myah zipped her duffel bag closed. Chloe replaced the miniature clothes peg that had secured the photo to the web of twine, nestled amongst snaps of cheer camp and senior prom at Sacred Heart, dreamily filtered images of the skate park at sunset and the sprawl of twinkling lights beneath the clifftop lookout, her mother and sister sunning themselves and smiling as they lounged on plastic lawn chairs, a yellow and white playhouse with pots of African violets hanging from baskets on the windowsills behind them, and a pink plastic tea set. 

Chloe had picked up an elective in photography in her second year of study, completely unrelated to her Behavioural Neuroscience major, and pinned a handful of images from her project submissions amongst the pictures from home – a black and white upshot, peering through the fronds of the towering palms outside the School of Law, a student engrossed in a thick volume on the other side of the arched window of the Torero book store on campus, Myah with her fist in the air at a rally, mouth open around a call to action, fierce and unapologetic in ripped jeans and a cropped tee knotted at her waist, her hair shorn close to her scalp and her dark eyes ablaze. 

She pinned the photo of Myah next to the delicate string of paper dolls.

“Is that him?” Myah asked, nodding at the photo in Chloe’s hand. Pressing her lips together, Chloe nodded, and offered it to the other girl. Myah took it gently, handling the edges with care, and a soft dimple curved at the corner of her mouth as she smiled. 

“It’s a nice picture.”

“He hated it,” Chloe said, sitting up on her knees and reaching to take the skateboard down from its mount. The grip tape was sandpaper rough and familiar beneath her fingertips as she lay it across her lap. “So, I submitted it to the yearbook team, and they used it in the ‘sports and after school activities’ section that year.”

Myah laughed, her teeth bright white against her dark lip stain, and nodded.

“Nice,” she said, shaking her head lightly. She considered for a moment, her dark eyes lingering on the photo. “He looks a little bit like Eddie.”

Chloe bit her lip, looking down at the other girl. 

It wasn’t the right tense to use – for either boy – but it felt cruel to correct her.

“Oh, yeah?” she asked, softly, and Myah nodded, pressing her lips together tightly. After a moment, she looked up at Chloe, her eyes bright with pain but her smile genuine.

“Let’s get you on the road.”

Myah helped her carry her things down to the car, the photograph tucked safely in her palm, and while Chloe loaded her duffel and the skateboard into the trunk next to the Christmas presents she had bought early to take down with her - _you might as well have them to put under the tree_ she could hear herself saying, exactly the way her mother would, much to her own embarrassment - the other girl leaned in through the passenger side door and caringly placed the photo in the coin tray. When Chloe saw it there, after she closed the trunk and circled to open the driver’s door to climb inside, she bit her lip, and turned away from the car.

“I forgot something,” she said, over the shoulder, trotting back toward the dorm. “I’ll just be a sec.”

Myah was waiting for her when she came back down, her hip propped against the side panel of the Volkswagen, and she stepped forward to enclose Chloe in a warm hug.

“Drive safe,” she said, stepping back to drop a brief kiss on Chloe’s forehead. “And text me when you get in.”

The drive was slow but uneventful, the weather kinder than the traffic, a clear blue sky laid flat over an endless winding trail of brake lights. She cracked the driver’s side window as she drove. The breeze was chilled and brittle, but carried the fresh scents of the season, wildflowers and nearby rain, and the distant salty tang of the ocean to the west. The Bluetooth connection played a shuffled mix of Bad Religion and NOFX, Rise Against, the Decedents and the Offspring, and then older songs, from when they had been kids, Midnight Oil and the Rolling Stones, from the music videos they would giggle at when her stepfather played them on the television on weekend mornings, mixed with Cindy Lauper, Bonnie Tyler and Shania Twain, from the days she and her mother had spent on the road when she was six.

Only a few weeks after moving in, Myah had shaken her awake in the middle of the night, and Chloe had roused with a start, panic crackling along her nerve endings.

“What?” she gasped, clutching for the other girl’s arm. “What is it?”

Myah had smiled conspiratorially.

“You have a car, right?”

They drove miles and miles in the dark, Chloe still dressed in her pyjamas, a sweater pulled on over the top, and Myah was perfectly calm, despite offering only deliberately cryptic answers to where they were going, who they were meeting, and why in the world they were doing it in the pitch black of the early morning hours. While Chloe clung to the steering wheel, anxiety whitening her knuckles, Myah casually scrolled through the playlists on her phone.

“You have great taste in music, by the way,” she offered casually, before breaking into a broad smile. “Hey, is this for us?” Myah turned the screen in Chloe’s direction, and the bright light imprinted on Chloe’s retinas when she blinked and returned her gaze to the road. “Aww. _C+M_. Chloe and Myah. Perfect.”

Chloe opened her mouth to protest, but was cut off by the abrupt guitar riff and weathered vocals of a Distillers track.

“Can I add to this?” Myah asked, already scrolling and tapping. “I love it, but you gotta have at least one track from the Bronx-“

“Start a new playlist,” Chloe interrupted, a little sharply, and glanced at Myah when she felt the other girl’s gaze on her. She raised a shoulder in a shrug, her tone deliberately light. “You can call it _Myah’s Kidnap Soundtrack – Songs to Drive Cross Country at One-A-M to_.”

Myah grinned, returning her gaze to the phone.

“OK. Fair,” she said, with a chuckle. “But we’re not driving cross-country.” She looked at the approaching road sign. “Actually, we’re almost there. Next left.”

There, as it turned out, was the house of a middle-aged woman that Myah knew only by name, a little cottage in a suburb full of wide streets and lovingly maintained gardens. The woman met them outside, a woolly robe over her nightgown, and guided a lady in her mid-twenties to the car, helping her into the back seat while Chloe sat, silent and puzzled, behind the steering wheel. Myah got out to talk to woman, standing close and voices low, and Chloe looked up at the younger lady in the rear-view mirror. Behind the fall of her pale blonde hair, her face was mottled in shades of blue bruising. Her eyes flicked to Chloe’s, and she smiled, very briefly.

“Thank you so much for doing this.”

Chloe had no idea what _this_ was, but she nodded. 

“Sure.”

Once Myah got back in the car, they drove for another twenty-five minutes, and as the rising sun began to edge the black sky with shades of grey, they arrived at a motel parking lot, where a woman in her sixties with a Jamaican accent was waiting with a soccer-mom van. After a few minutes of chat, and a brief embrace between Myah and the young woman, they parted ways.

On the long drive back to campus, the sky warming to a pink-tinged silver, Myah explained how she had become involved with the network, a kind of underground railroad designed to help battered women escape their abusive partners. No one in the chain knew anyone other than the person on either side of them, to protect the fleeing woman from any attempts by her partner or anyone that he might send to find her. For some women, isolated and cut off from their friends and family by their abuser, it was the only chance they would ever have to safely break away. 

“Kids are a little trickier,” Myah said with a sigh, propping her elbow against the window and cradling her head in her hand. “We’re still trying to figure out how to work around kidnapping charges.”

As they approached Alcala Park, Chloe thought about how much difference that kind of support system might have made to someone like her own mother, and shook her head.

“You’re amazing, you know?” she said, looking across at the other girl while A Day to Remember played softly over Bluetooth. “You’re so passionate.”

Myah’s gaze slid away and her jaw set uncomfortably. 

“It’s not passion,” she murmured, her eyes on the dimly lit road ahead. “It’s guilt.” She swallowed thickly and looked across at Chloe, her eyes bright with pain. “I fucked up, and I don’t think I can make it right. But I’m trying.”

Chloe felt an ache in the back of her throat and nodded.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “I know that feeling.”

The memories flickered across the surface of her conscious thoughts, floating aimlessly like dandelion seeds, pretty and distracting, and when an unfamiliar song cutting through the mix, Chloe blinked. 

Maybe Myah had managed to add the Bronx to the playlist before Chloe had stopped her.

On the side of the road, a large green sign proclaimed:

**Evergreen  
Exit  
2 miles**

Her mother and Amelia had moved in with Tom a couple of months earlier, and although Chloe had been to the house once for Christmas in her senior year at high school, she tapped the address into the GPS on her phone to be sure. The house was an older two-storey craftsman, inherited from his grandparents, and sat on a sprawling block of green lawns and carefully curated gardens, which Tom spent the weekends tending to with genuine care. As Chloe pulled into the long, paved driveway, Tom’s two rescue Greyhounds, Pudding and Milkshake, trotted out onto the porch, closely followed by Amelia. 

“Y-you’re-re he-ere!”

Amelia’s excited declaration stuttered as she bounded down the porch steps, hurrying along the path between garden beds full of glossy-leaved azaleas and gardenias, and threw her arms around Chloe’s neck as she climbed from the driver’s seat of the Volkswagen. She had grown, and at almost thirteen, towered over Chloe by several inches. 

“You’re here,” Amelia breathed into her hair, her arms around her shoulders squeezing tight. “I missed you so much.”

Chloe smiled, patting her sister’s back.

“I missed you too, squirt.” 

It wasn’t something she had ever called Amelia – that had been _their_ thing - but it slipped out, and once Chloe had said it, it felt right. Amelia stepped back, her expression registering surprise, before a soft smile lit her face.

Amelia helped her bring her things into the house, although they made it less than two feet into the foyer, a brightly lit space with walls crowded with framed photographs of her and Amelia and Tom’s two boys, before their mother appeared from the kitchen, her eyes bright with tears and her arms thrown wide to enclose Chloe in a hug. While she tried to keep the armload of Christmas gifts from being crushed between them and the dogs milled around their legs, their thin tails whipping back and forth happily, Chloe spotted Tom, smiling but uncertain, over her mother’s shoulder, and offered him a grin.

“Hey, Tom.”

He rubbed at his moustache and offered an apologetic shrug as her mother stepped back, laughing at herself and swiping the joyful tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said. “Help you upstairs with your bags?”

The guest room had clearly been redecorated by her mother – the walls painted a warm cream and the bedding soft and coordinated in shades of blush pink – and Chloe didn’t have to ask for Louise to begin listing where she had purchased each item, the throw cushions on sale for half the price, the vase on the dresser real crystal and an absolute steal at an estate sale.

“I picked these flowers from the garden this morning,” she said, gently rearranging the blooms, an eclectic mix of mariposa lilies, chamise, and California buckwheat. “I thought you’d appreciate them.”

Chloe sank onto the corner of the bed beside Amelia as her mother spiralled into a one-sided stream of conversation, starting with the casual work Chloe had picked up, delivering bouquets of flowers for a local florist around her class schedule, to how long she would be staying for, what she wanted to eat at Thanksgiving, was she still coming home for Christmas, oh and by the way, if she wanted to, it would be so nice if she stayed the morning after Thanksgiving so they could all put the tree up together, as a family.

“Honey, maybe Chloe’d like to take a minute to settle in?” Tom suggested, gently, from the doorway. 

Louise, who had moved across the room and was rearranging the throw blanket on the chair in the corner, appeared slightly startled, as if she had woken from a light sleep. She looked at the two girls on the bed, noted Amelia’s sarcastically slanted eyebrow, and offered an apologetic smile.

“Oh, I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she sighed, clasping her hands together, “I’m just so happy to have you home.”

Chloe smiled reassuringly.

“I’m happy to be home, too,” she said, then bit her lip, hesitating. “I was hoping… you might have the box of things that you packed up from my old room?”

Louise beamed, crossing the room to cradle her cheek with one hand.

“You bet I do.” Excited again, she turned toward the vase on the sideboard, patting the empty space beside it. “Oh, wouldn’t your little pink tea set look so sweet just here!”

Chloe licked her lower lip and shrugged. 

“Actually, I was looking for the jacket.”

Louise turned to face her, her expression gentle.

“Of course, sweetheart,” she said, looking at Tom, who lingered in the doorway, the dogs jostling beside him. “Tom will bring it up for you. It’s in the cupboard in my craft room.”

After the two of them had left, Louise explaining to Tom where he could find the box in painstaking detail, Chloe turned a curious look toward her sister. 

“Mom has a craft room?”

Amelia, slouched against the throw cushions, rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, she does craft now,” she said, and although there was a sarcastic edge to her tone, Chloe thought that actually, her sister sounded happy, and maybe a little proud. “She bakes, too,” she added, the words almost immediately followed by a disappointed wail from downstairs. Amelia smirked, shaking her head. “But she’s not very good at it.”

Chloe chuckled, and looked at the caringly arranged posy on the sideboard.

“You want to go get boba tea?” she asked, over her shoulder.

Behind her, Amelia sat up with a smile.

Driving along the main street in town, smiling as they passed the Crestmont, its façade spiderwebbed with scaffolding to support the contractors applying a fresh coat of paint to its exterior, Chloe lifted her shoulder in a shrug.

“There are parties, sure. But I’ve never been to one where people are actually wearing togas. That would be…”

She was dimly aware of the thought that slipped from her grasp like sand through her fingers, but not enough to realign her attention, her eyes locked on the Jeep Wrangler as it approached from the opposite direction, rolling past casually and continuing on toward the Walplex. The moment it left her periphery, her head whipped around instinctively, her gaze on the rear-view mirror as she watched its blinker flicker, brake lights glowing red as it eased to a stop at an intersection. 

“It’s kind of weird, huh?” 

Chloe looked at Amelia, who offered a small, understanding smile from the passenger seat, and realised that her breathing had stuttered, the apparition from her past stealing her focus so suddenly and completely that, as she took a slow breath, she couldn’t remember what she had been saying, every conscious thought swept aside, out of her reach. 

“Ben Holliday bought it,” Amelia offered gently as Chloe slowed to a stop at a crosswalk, her attention flicking between the vehicle in the rear-view mirror and the family crossing in front of them, a little boy and a little girl, perhaps six or seven years old, bickering over a handheld gaming console. “I think you graduated the same year as his brother?”

Of course. Ben had been a freshman the year that they had been seniors. She had transferred by then, but she remembered the younger boy, shy and quiet despite that he towered over their mother, already nearly as tall and solid as his older brother, when they came to watch Luke’s football games. Memories unspooled in fragments; the cold wind on her bare legs and her breath frosting in the air at a night game, the smoky smell of hotdogs and chilli fries from the concession stand, the vibrations in the dirt beneath her feet from the thunder of the crowd, Sheri smiling encouragingly at the squad, and the boys. Number 21. Number 85. Number 83. Number 32. 

“He made quarterback this year,” Amelia continued, her tone light and conversational, and Chloe suspected that her sister recognised that she needed a moment to collect the splintered pieces of her concentration, the scented wisps that rose from the memories like smoked woodchips and hung in the spaces around her conscious thoughts, obscuring everything that was _now_ , insisting that she stay back there, or _then_ , where it was safe, because everything that could happen had happened already, and nothing could have been worse. 

“Their sister is in my chem class, and she joined gymnastics last year.” Amelia smiled, casting Chloe a sideways glance. “She’s super sweet, but I feel a bit sorry for her. She might actually be bigger than Luke by the time she graduates.”

Chloe just nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“Hey,” Amelia said, drawing her attention. “Are you sure I can’t come on Friday?”

Chloe took a slow breath, and shook her head.

“You need to follow the custody agreement,” she reminded her sister, her tone serious but understanding. She knew how much Amelia disliked having to spend time with Radic and his new family, often left to babysit his two-year-old twin daughters while he and his wife went out to dinners and parties. “If you don’t go to your dad’s this weekend, he might get mad, and go back to family court to try to stop you having both Thanksgiving and Christmas with us this year.”

Amelia sighed, shaking her head.

“I know,” she said, a hint of petulant pout edging the admission. “But I wish I could be there with you.”

Chloe smiled as she made a right, easing the Volkswagen into a parking space outside of the Taiwanese café. She reached to clasp her sister’s hand, squeezing gently.

“I won’t be alone,” she reassured her, waiting for Amelia to meet her gaze before continuing. “And not being there doesn’t mean you don’t care. He knew how much you loved him.” She squeezed again, when tears brightened Amelia’s blue eyes. “He loved you, too.”

On the stereo, the playlist looped back to the Bronx song Myah had added. 

Sniffling, Amelia swiped at her eye with the back of her hand, and nodded.

“Yeah,” she said, quietly. “I know.”

Later, after a long dinner that ranged from a bountifully arranged charcuterie board to a hearty main of roast chicken and vegetables, courtesy of Tom, and a rather stunted and liberally frosted chocolate cake, the burned bottom sliced off to salvage the rest for dessert, Chloe said goodnight and headed upstairs to the guest room. Her mother had switched on the lamp by the bed and turned the sheets down for her. On the bedside table, the photo that she had brought from her dorm room lay in the soft glow of the lamp and, on the opposite side of the room, by the chair, was a large packing box, the tape carefully cut open.

Beside the vase of flowers, a little plastic tea set was laid out, the pieces slightly mismatched, and as Chloe rearranged them, she realised that her mother wouldn’t have set the sugar bowl on a saucer or placed the teapot lid on the milk jug, and that the caring gesture must have been made by Tom. 

On the chair in the corner, an aqua blue and white Liberty varsity jacket had been carefully laid over the throw blanket.

Tired to the marrow of her bones, Chloe lay in the bed in the guest bedroom and tapped out a text.

**Myah**  
_dinner was great. Mom and tom are like high school sweethearts. Its really cute. I wish you were here. I could do with some of your wonder woman strength_

She tipped her head, glancing at the varsity jacket, and scrolled to a new number.

**Diego**  
_Do you need a ride on Friday?_

And then, biting the inside of her lip, scrolled again.

**Sheri**  
_Hey.  
How’s the bus ride going?  
Thanks again for doing this_

~

I've tried so hard just to be myself  
But I've erased everything I was  
I tried searching for the truth alone  
And I remember everything I've done  
I'm thinking everything will turn out fine  
But I'm a little kid without a soul  
Oh give me just a little bit more time  
Just a little bit

**Notice of Eviction – the Bronx**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to closetfascination and comfortwriter28 for your help, support and encouragement. If you're not already reading their fics, do yourself a favor!
> 
> This chapter was a struggle for me compared to Sheri's first chapter, so I apologise that the tone and flow are a bit inconsistent. I restarted a bunch of times and ended up cobbling together this chapter. 
> 
> Next up, for Christmas next week, is a set of Christmas-themed mini-scenes, and probably the fluffiest thing I've ever written in my entire life :)
> 
> If you're interested, this is the Bronx song that Myah added to Chloe's playlist - luckily for her, it suits Monty and Chloe pretty well - [ Notice of Eviction ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKSLYJ9y8ZM)
> 
> And for anyone who isn't sure of the photo reference:  
> [](https://ibb.co/pj1p9hF)


	4. Christmas Special

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bumper-size collection of Christmas scenes involving every possible combination of Monty, Justin, Sheri and Chloe :)

“Not that one!” Amelia insisted, pointing, stretching to her lavender- varnished toes. “ _That_ one!”

Monty shifted the gleaming silver bauble to the next branch over.

“Here?”

Amelia’s groan-accompanied eyeroll made the answer clear. 

“I thought we had this worked out?” Chloe reminded her sister from where she crouched beside the crate of decorations, a colour coordinated treasure trove of shimmering baubles the colour of jewels, glittery stars, painted glass snowmen and delicate feathered birds, sparkling pinecones and prancing plastic reindeer. “You’re in charge of the bottom of the tree, I’m doing the middle, and Monty does the top.”

It was a feeble argument – while that had been what they had agreed, it certainly hadn’t been reflected in their responsibilities so far. Monty had put the tree together while Chloe detangled the lights, and mostly, Amelia took it upon herself to inform them of each thing they did wrong, from the straightness of the star atop the tree, which Monty had been directed to adjust several times, to the distribution of the lights amongst the branches, Amelia pointing out flaws for Chloe to adjust while Monty replaced broken bulbs. 

As expected, Amelia cast her a dark look.

“That was before I saw how he decorates.”

Monty cocked an amused eyebrow, hung the bauble on the branch anyway, and reached for another ornament.

“You can’t put two silver together!” Amelia protested, snatching the bauble from his hand before he could hang it. She passed it to Chloe, who dutifully exchanged it for a ruby red ornament. Amelia shook her head as she handed it to Monty. “We’re gonna have to help you decorate your tree, or it’s gonna look terrible.”

Monty lifted his shoulder in a shrug as he hung the candy-apple bauble. 

“We don’t have a tree.”

Amelia, reaching to pin a shining gold bird with a glittered feather tail, looked up at him, eyes rounded with horror.

“Why not?”

Chloe darted a look in Monty’s direction. He could be incredibly direct and carelessly blunt about topics most people would attempt to soften the impact of, and she couldn’t be certain that he wouldn’t simply admit that his family didn’t have a Christmas tree because they couldn’t afford one, or because his father was so drunk one year that he fell over it, damaged the string of lights and set the tree alight with the broken, arcing wires, or because his parents simply didn’t want one, not even when he was a child, and couldn’t understand why Santa skipped his house every year. 

Monty looked down at Amelia and raised a conspiratorial eyebrow.

“Because I’m on the naughty list.”

Amelia clutched the golden bird in her hands tightly. 

“What?” She shook her head, puzzled. “Why?”

Monty bent down, winking over the girl’s shoulder at Chloe, and whispered in Amelia’s ear.

“ _No_ ,” Amelia gasped, jerking away to cast him a wild, disbelieving look. Monty only shrugged, selecting a glass snowman ornament with a black top hat and green scarf, and reached to hang it on the tree while Amelia whipped around to Chloe, blurting, “He ate the cookies left out for Santa!”

Chloe raised her eyebrows in an imitation of shock.

“Oh, man,” she said, shaking her head as she worked on detangling a string of golden bells. “That’s definitely naughty list behaviour.”

Amelia chewed her lip, turning the golden bird over in her hands. 

“What if Monty sleeps here on Christmas Eve?” she suggested, looking at both of them as a slow, scheming grin began to brighten her expression. She looked up at Monty, smiling mischievously. “Then we could trick Santa into bringing your presents.”

Monty chuckled and held out his hand for the bird.

“I think that’d get you on the naughty list, squirt.”

Handing Monty the ornament, Amelia frowned, dejected. While Monty pinned the bird amongst the branches, Chloe sat up on her knees, offering Amelia the string of bells. The little girl looked at her, the corners of her mouth turned down with disappointment.

“How about,” Chloe said, handing one end of the garland to Amelia, “we bake some cookies, and Monty can leave them out for Santa, to say sorry?”

Amelia’s face brightened with a glittering smile. She nodded enthusiastically, shuffling around the tree in the opposite direction to Chloe, threading the bells between the branches. She paused as she passed Monty, elbowing him in the side, and looked up at him where he was straightening the star on the top of the tree before she noticed that it had begun to sag to the left. 

“But you can’t eat these ones!”

She shoved her spare hand up at him, pinkie finger extended.

Monty smirked, and linked his finger with hers. 

“Promise.”

~

“Oh my goodness, look at that one!”

Justin ducked his head to peer through the windscreen of Sheri’s dad’s SUV at the two-storey home that Sheri pointed to over the steering wheel. 

The front yard was alight with a caringly arranged nativity scene, replete with Joseph, Mary, baby Jesus in his manger, and an assortment of barnyard animals, including a donkey, a goat, and a flock of chickens. On the other side of the driveway, there was an inflatable display of holiday folk, Santa in his sleigh, Frosty the snowman, Rudolph the reindeer, penguins wearing top-hats, a gingerbread man with a candy-cane crook and, lurking in the background, the Grinch. The guttering, porch and windowsills of the house were dripping with glittering icicle lights, and the garden beds were staged with rope-light silhouettes of reindeer and elves. 

Sheri grinned at him, her eyes bright with joy.

“Should we get out and walk through?”

Justin was already unbuckling his seatbelt.

“Fuck yeah.”

Sheri laughed as she pulled the SUV to the curb, parking behind a station-wagon with a _baby on board_ sign in the rear window and three child booster chairs crammed shoulder to shoulder in the back seat. Children ran excitedly between the light displays and crawled into the stable to have their photo taken with baby Jesus by parents wielding smartphones as Justin and Sheri climbed out of the car. Sheri reached back inside to grab the thermos from the console between the seats, then skirted around the hood to follow Justin into the yard. 

As they wound their way through the displays, following the loosely defined path lined with red and white flashing candy-canes, Sheri unscrewed the lid of the thermos and tucked it into the pocket of her coat. Sugar-wisp steam coiled from the mouth of the thermos, and she handed it to Justin, watching with a smile as he paused to inhale the rich, sweet scent of the hot chocolate before taking a sip.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he groaned, drawing the vowel, and earning a sideways glance from a nearby mother snapping photographs of a little girl trampling the homeowner’s petunias as she stamped amongst the reindeer. Justin took another sip, then wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. “That is fucking amazing.”

Sheri laughed as she accepted the thermos back, and took a sip. It was her mother’s foolproof recipe, irresistible and moreish, a concoction capable of healing physical and emotional hurts, mending broken relationships, and entrapping the hearts of lovers. 

Justin wound his way through the squealing, darting children, the hood of his sweater pulled up to shield his ears from the biting cold and his hands shoved into the front pocket, Sheri at his side. He paused beneath the huge willow tree at the centre of the yard, its trunk and branches coiled with lights, threads wound through the branches and dripping amongst the leaves, glittering like individual wishes, sealed with a kiss and released into the night sky. Sheri stood at his side, and tipped her head back to mirror his, the swooping branches hanging low enough to brush about their shoulders. 

“I used to do this with my mom.”

Sheri looked at him, but Justin’s attention remained on the gently swaying leaves, the twinkling lights reflecting in his clearwater blue eyes. 

“Drive around to look at the Christmas lights?” she clarified.

Justin nodded.

“Yeah,” he said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “I mean, we would get on the bus.” He slipped one hand beneath his hood, rubbing the back of his neck. “Sometimes we’d sneak on through the back doors if she didn’t have money for tickets, and we’d ride around Oakland looking at all of the lights and decorations that the city put up, until the bus reached the end of its route, or the driver kicked us off.”

Justin blinked up at the glittering lights and exhaled quietly.

At his side, Sheri leaned closer, and linked her arm with his. She offered him the thermos, and he accepted it gratefully. Justin sipped hot chocolate as Sheri tipped her head against his shoulder, and they watched the coils of steam rise into the twinkling tree branches curving over them. 

The path back to the car took them past the mailbox, where the homeowners had set out a collection tin for the children’s ward at Mercy Hospital. Sheri and Justin each emptied their pockets of coins, and fed them into the tin one by one.

“I wish I could pour this hot chocolate in there,” Justin said, with a childlike smile dimpling his cheek. “It’s like, the answer to world peace, or something.”

Sheri grinned, and reached to squeeze his hand. 

“C’mon,” she said, tipping her head toward her dad’s SUV. “I saw on Facebook there’s a house over on Maple with actual carollers.”

Justin grinned brightly as they headed back to the car. He waited until they were both strapped in to commence his rousing rendition of _Jingle Bell Rock_ , Sheri laughing and shaking her head as she pulled away from the curb.

~

Justin leaned down to inspect the hams through the glass deli display case. He had no idea what a good ham looked like, or what a bad ham looked like, or how high quality a ham bought from Walplex could possibly be, but it was the first time he was baking one, and he didn’t want it to suck. 

The cuts were the first thing he had to figure out – whole leg, half leg, quarter leg, shoulder, boneless, semi-boneless or bone-in. Then there was the curing and flavouring – beechwood smoked, honey, hickory, maybe champagne. He had no idea what the fuck that meant, and was too frayed to figure it out after spending the last half-hour battling the mothers of Evergreen county, all of whom appeared to have left their Christmas dinner shopping to the last minute to ensure that they bought only the _freshest_ produce, as if their children could tell the difference between a cherry bought yesterday or the day before, or would give a shit even if they could. 

He had spotted Karen Dempsey complaining loudly about the quality of the cranberries this year, to no one in particular but also to anyone who might potentially listen, and have given her wide berth. 

Justin set down his shopping basket between his sneakers, the jars inside rattling against one another. Marisa had given him her recipe for a marmalade and mustard glaze – fucking amazing, he devoured the copious leftovers every year – and although he was sure the Walkers gave her enough of a grocery allowance to purchase the finest available ingredients, he was satisfied that he would be able to make do with the discount and on-sale brands that he could afford, and anyway, his mother wouldn’t know the difference.

Normally, he would have just rocked up at the Walker’s the day after Christmas, like he did every year, and put his puppy dog eyes to good use, securing plate after plate of ham and turkey sandwiches with a side of honey-glazed carrots, but this year the Walkers were skiing in Japan over the holidays. It wasn’t all bad, the other guys – Zach, Scott, Luke, Diego and Monty – had organised to go camping the day after Christmas, and Justin was sort of looking forward to it. They were meeting at Luke’s to pack their gear into two cars and heading out to the campgrounds from there. 

As he considered the options, past the hams, Justin thought he saw a flash of plaid and straightened to look over the counter. Monty, sitting on a crate between the meat slicing machine and a doorway, cocked an eyebrow at him. His shirt was a checked pattern of maroon and forest green, which Justin found it oddly festive, despite that it was paired with jeans that looked like they had been put through a garbage compactor, torn and hanging open at the knees. 

Justin frowned, puzzled.

“Where’s Diego?”

Monty lifted his shoulder in a disinterested shrug. 

“Sorry, dude. He doesn’t date customers,” he said, and when Justin blinked at him, Monty grinned with savage amusement, explaining with a liberal dash of sarcasm, “Store policy. He saw you coming and asked me to let you down gently.”

Justin rolled his eyes. 

“Are you allowed to be back there?” he asked, although the answer seemed obvious. “I mean, like, is it even sanitary?”

Monty raised his eyebrows, and Justin spluttered, realising the implication of his question.

“Just, because, you know, like-” he attempted haltingly, while Monty watched him struggle, and raised his shoulders in a helpless shrug, “-health regulations?”

It wasn’t any better than his first attempt, and while Monty appeared mildly irritated at best, guilt trickled through him. Justin had spent a significant portion of his childhood being ridiculed by other kids for being dirty or unkempt, and he neither thought that about the other boy, or wanted to give Monty the impression that he did. 

“Shit,” he muttered. “Look, dude, I just want a ham.” He shook his head, his expression imploring. “When’s Diego coming back?”

Monty glanced around. The other deli staff were at the far ends of the displays, one trying and failing to slice bacon to the satisfaction of the woman he was serving, and two others down by the quickly diminishing display of turkeys, answering questions about potential allergens in the stuffing with growing exasperation. It seemed suddenly obvious to Justin how Diego had managed to sneak the other boy in to keep him company during his shift. 

Monty stood and moved to the display case. He looked down at the hams that the other boy had been considering and seemed no more comfortable making a selection than Justin had been.

“Which one do you want?”

Justin glanced again at the distracted employees, then down at the hams behind the glass. 

“I guess that one?”

He pointed to a bone-in, half-leg that was bigger than his head. 

Justin really liked ham.

Monty didn’t bother putting on gloves, but he did slip a plastic bag over his hand before he reached in to retrieve the ham, taking it by the shank and inverting the plastic to cover it. He set it, ungently, on the counter behind the display case and reached for a piece of butcher’s paper. 

As he messily wrapped the ham in the paper, scrunching and tucking in stray corners, Monty grunted, and asked, “Will this even fit in your fucking oven?” 

Sometimes, it was impossible to distinguish a genuine question from a barbed insult with Monty, and Justin wondered if he should regret feeling bad for implying the other boy was unhygienic. 

“Man, fuck you,” he muttered, shaking his head. “I’ll fucking make it fit.”

The other boy glanced up at him, his expression surprised, then lifted his shoulders in a shrug. 

“Wouldn’t fit in ours.”

Shit.

Not an insult, this time. 

Justin sighed and bit the inside of his lip, but pressed down the apology that bubbled low in his throat. If anything was likely to turn an innocent, although abrasively posed question to an insult, it would be showing regret. And anyway, Monty appeared unbothered, the tip of his tongue at the corner of his mouth as he hefted the ham unceremoniously onto the scales and punched seemingly random keys in the attached register. A price label printed, and he slapped it haphazardly onto the poorly wrapped meat, securing a couple of corners beneath the adhesive while another swung loosely as he passed it over the display case to Justin. Justin looked down at the price sticker and realised that the other boy had processed the sale as chicken wings, which were on special for a third of the price of the ham per pound. 

Justin shook his head, looking up at the other boy.

“Dude…“

Monty opened his mouth to say something when Diego appeared from the doorway behind him, pulling on a pair of gloves with a harried expression. He looked at Monty, then Justin, and frowned.

“What are you doing?”

Monty shrugged.

“Justy’s making ham for Christmas,” he said, casually, so accustomed to lying that it didn’t even register in his voice. “He’s gonna bring the leftovers camping.”

Diego glanced at the register, which displayed the last sale as ten pounds of chicken wings, and looked between the two boys.

“Yeah, OK,” he said, reaching to clear the register display. He looked at Justin as a middle-aged woman with a full trolley and an impatient expression came up beside him, a conspiratorial smile at the corner of his mouth. “Have a good Christmas.”

Justin tucked the ham beneath his arm and retrieved his shopping basket, grinning mischievously at the two boys.

“See you at Luke’s.”

~

Chloe let the bathroom door swing closed behind her, her poms tucked awkwardly under one arm as she reached to resecure the plastic holly pinned in her hair, trotting quickly toward the courts, when she heard the shout for assistance. 

“Yo, Zach. A little help?”

Chloe paused, glancing around. The door to the boy’s bathroom was propped halfway open. She couldn’t see inside – not that she especially wanted to, the girl’s bathrooms with the persistent bitchy graffiti and sheets of toilet paper discarded on the floor to stick to the bottom of unsuspecting shoes was bad enough – nor could she see Zach anywhere in the empty hallway. At the far end, there was a constant rumble of overlapping conversation and shifting feet as the crowd waited for the half-time intermission to end, and the final game of the season before winter break to resume play.

“Dempsey! C’mon, man!”

The frustrated shout echoed off of the tiled walls of the bathroom and rebounded out the door.

Cautiously, Chloe approached the doorway of the boy’s bathroom. From the threshold, she could hear grunting and cursing in more than one male voice, and in the sliver of the mirror that she could see at that angle, caught a flash of something red. Slowly, she edged inside and peered around the corner of the first stall. 

She blinked, puzzled. 

“What are you doing?”

Justin whipped around, startled, yanking his hands away from Luke, who was dressed in one of the padded sumo suits some of the boys had worn for Halloween earlier in the year, his boxer shorts, and only one sleeve of a bright red Santa Claus coat, the rest of the outfit strewn across the bathroom. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” Justin breathed, pressing his fist to his chest over his Liberty Tigers basketball singlet in an apparent attempt to ease it from hammering behind his ribcage. He closed his eyes for a moment and then sighed. “You’re not Zach.”

Chloe simply arched an eyebrow. It wasn’t posed as a question, and in any event, the answer seemed obvious.

Instead, she asked, “Do you need some help?”

“No-“ Justin began to say.

“Yes,” Luke cut over him, lowering his hands to cover his modesty but unable to reach past the belly of the sumo suit. His boxer shorts, festively appropriate, were printed with gingerbread men and candy canes. “We need help.”

Chloe set down her poms on the edge of the sink and took the pair of red trousers tossed there. 

“Where the fuck is Dempsey?” Justin grumbled as he took the loose sleeve of the jacket and resumed struggling to stretch it far enough that Luke could slip his hand into the opening, his manoeuvrability hindered by the bulk of the sumo suit. “He was supposed to check how long until the second half and then come back.”

Chloe opened the waist of the trousers and crouched, holding them wide enough for Luke to step into. It took a couple of attempts before he managed to land one socked foot in the correct hole, unable to see past the belly of the suit. As she helped him guide his other foot in, Chloe twisted her wrist to glance at her watch. 

“You’ve got about three minutes,” she said, and Justin cursed, although it was tinged with relief as he managed to yank the sleeve over Luke’s hand, and tug it up his arm. “Coach Patrick was looking for Zach when I left to go to the bathroom. He probably got caught up.” Chloe levered herself upright, pulling the pants up with her, and looked past Luke’s arm at Justin. “What are you guys even planning to do?”

Justin grinned cheekily and waved for her to join him behind Luke. Chloe waited until the blonde boy had taken hold of the waistband of the pants, pulling the drawstrings tight to secure them beneath the belly of the suit, then peered around him. 

“We’re just gonna put the visiting team off their game, is all,” Justin said and, with nimble fingers, unbuttoned the drop-seat at the back of the trousers. The flap fell open, exposing Luke’s Christmas themed boxer shorts underneath. 

Chloe pressed down a giggle, shaking her head.

“Does he know?” she whispered, nodding at Luke, but before Justin could answer, Luke spoke over the top of him.

“If you mean do I know that Santa’s gonna be flashing his fine ass to the biggest crowd of the season-“ he said, boyish glee in his voice as he grinned, “-then yeah, I know.” Luke turned, bent over, and wiggled his hips. The height difference between them aimed his backside a lot closer to Chloe’s face than any of them had anticipated, and as she stepped back, laughing, Luke blushed, but shrugged. “Distracting, right?”

Chloe nodded.

“Oh yeah, I think that’ll do the job,” she said with a bright smile.

Chloe retrieved the pair of black boots from beneath the sinks and set them down for Luke to step into while she buttoned the front of his jacket and secured the shiny black belt. It strained over the belly of the sumo suit, and she struggled to fasten the buckle while Justin reached up to apply the curly white beard and floppy red hat. 

“Alright, man,” Justin grinned, stepping back to take in their handy work. “You ready?”

Luke nodded, and then ducked his head to accommodate as Chloe reached up to adjust the jaunty angle of his hat. As Chloe checked her watch, the buzzer sounded out on the court, marking the beginning of the next half, and Luke gave his hips another experimental wiggle, the drop-seat flapping open behind him. 

Chloe smiled at Justin and then up at Luke. 

“Would Santa like an escort from the vice-captains of the basketball team and the cheer squad?” 

Luke’s blue eyes crinkled with a grin above the bushy white beard, and he handed Chloe her poms. 

~

Sheri was a last-minute addition to the boys’ post-Christmas camping trip.

Initially, when Justin had responded to the text she had sent, asking if he was around and might like to hang out, with an invitation to join them, she had declined. She didn’t want to intrude, especially after everything that had gone wrong the day before. She wasn’t sure that she was in the spirit for festivities, and worried that she would just bring the mood down. 

But Justin clearly wasn’t going to accept that. 

The boys had launched a coordinated text campaign.

**Justin**   
_come on, please? we all want you to come!_

**Zach**   
_the more the MERRIER. Lol. Get it? Coz it’s XMAS?_

**Monty**   
_jfc. say youll come before he cracks another joke_

**Scott**   
_I rolled a bunch for the weekend. C’mon. You know you want to._

**Diego**   
_seriously, though, we really do want you to come_

Sheri had laughed, rubbing at the dark, tired circle beneath her eye with the back of her hand as she tapped out a text to Justin.

_alright, alright! I’ll come! Tell them to stop texting me! ;P_

They relented, but as she was packing some clothes into a backpack, her phone pinged with another messaged.

**Luke**   
_Don’t forget to bring leftovers!!!_

When she went into the lounge to ask her dad, he simply waved a hand, his head down and his phone pressed to his ear, his expression strained. Sheri retrieved one of the sleeping bags from the top shelf of the hallway closet, unused since their last family trip to Big Bear two years ago, dropped a kiss on Peach’s nose at the front door, and walked down to the bus stop.

Sheri arrived at Luke’s dressed warmly in jeans, boots, and a weather-proof puffer jacket zipped over her sweater. The boys were already packing their gear into the back of Monty’s Jeep and Luke’s pick-up. The blonde boy beamed when she offered him her backpack to load into the tray, and two plastic Tupperware containers, one packed with leftover roasted potatoes, green bean casserole and stuffing, and the other an untouched chocolate cake, iced with white frosting and dusted with desiccated coconut. 

Christmas dinner had been aborted before they had made it as far as dessert. They had barely sat down to eat before her parents had started in on each other, the argument growing progressively louder and nastier until they had both stormed to opposite ends of the house, and her mother had packed a bag to go and stay in a hotel for a few nights. 

Watching Luke add her Tupperware to the coolers, shifting packages wrapped in aluminium foil and plastic containers to make space, she tried not to think about it. 

Sheri rode shotgun in his pick-up truck, which gave her a front seat to Luke singing along with Mariah Carey’s Christmas album, which he refused to change, no matter how much Justin and Zach pestered him from the back seat. He was having so much fun that she couldn’t resist joining him for a pitchy, giggle-ridden rendition of _All I want for Christmas is You_ as they followed the Jeep along the narrow, winding road into the woods. 

The boys pitched the three two-person tents they had packed, Zach taking the time to show her how to lay the flooring and use a mallet to hammer in the tent pegs. The air was clear and crisp and carried the heavy scent of pine. They had chosen a spot by a gently flowing creek, and the soft, musical chorus of the water shifting over the rocks salved her singed nerves from the day before. In the afternoon, they followed the creek south to where it opened into squat falls feeding a series of rockpools, and Diego had climbed down each stony edge ahead of her, then reached his hand up to steady her as she followed. 

In the evening, Scott and Justin built a bonfire, and Luke handed around the cobbled together potluck of offerings – turkey with cranberry reduction and lamb cutlets with mint and rosemary panko crust from Zach’s family Christmas party, thickly sliced marmalade and mustard glazed ham and a loaf of white bread for sandwiches from Justin, Luke’s mother’s famous cornbread, half a sweet potato casserole topped with marshmallow, and barbeque-glazed sausages wrapped in bacon, and leftover roast pork and _telera_ from Diego and his _Tia _Rosa’s small scale Christmas dinner. Monty unloaded a case of beer and a brandished a bottle of spiced rum from the back of the Wrangler, and Scott grinned as he retrieved a fistful of sticky-sweet smelling blunts from the glove box.__

__They passed around paper plates and plastic cutlery, and gold and silver Christmas crackers leftover from the Dempsey’s party, popping them open and donning the paper crowns inside. Sitting in a loose ring around the bonfire in camping chairs and on blankets, they handed each other containers of food, cans of beer and expertly rolled joints, read aloud the painfully lame jokes from their crackers, and Sheri ate and laughed until her stomach hurt, and the sky through the branches of the trees overhead was black and spangled with stars._ _

__Sleeping arrangements presented an obvious question, and Luke was the first to pipe up._ _

__“You can share with us,” he said cheerfully, a stack of empty beer cans at his feet._ _

__Diego cast him a puzzled frown, then looked over his shoulder at the semi-circle of two-person tents they had pitched beneath the shelter of the tress._ _

__“Dude, how the hell is that gonna work?” he asked, shaking his head. “Unless you’re planning to sleep with your legs sticking out of the tent?”_ _

__The boys laughed, and Luke shrugged, grinning as he popped open another beer. Justin glanced at Zach, who simply shook his head apologetically. At his height and size, their tent would be no more accommodating to three occupants._ _

__“You can share with us,” Scott said, nudging Sheri’s elbow where he sat beside her on a tartan patterned blanket. “We should all fit, but I gotta warn you-“ he leaned closer, as if to share a secret, his eyes bloodshot and half-hooded, and one of the joints hanging between his fingers. “Monty snores.”_ _

__Monty snorted on the other side of the fire, and flicked the tab from his beer can at the other boy._ _

__“Fuck off.”_ _

__Sheri smiled and sipped from her beer._ _

__As it grew later and colder, the boys began to peel away from the fire, saying their goodnights and retiring to their tents. Although she was tired, Sheri was reluctant to sleep, and instead walked down to the flat, wide rocks that lined the creek’s edge, and sat beneath the sprinkle of stars, her knees drawn to her chest and the bonfire crackling down to embers behind her._ _

__It had been quiet for a while when she heard footsteps on the rocks, and Monty sat down beside her, still wearing his sunflower yellow paper crown. He offered her the two-thirds empty bottle of rum, and when she shook her head, took the freshly lit blunt from the corner of his mouth and handed that to her instead._ _

__“It’s Scott who snores,” he said, looking out over the silvery reflection of the moonlight on the gently shifting surface of the creek and flicking coconut from the back of his hand, leftover from the huge slice of cake he had eaten earlier. “Like a fucking grizzly bear.”_ _

__Sheri smiled and tipped her head back, exhaling smoke toward the stars._ _

__“It’s OK,” she said. “I don’t really feel like sleeping, anyway.”_ _

__Monty nodded and was quiet for a while, sipping from the bottle of rum._ _

__“You know,” he said, looking at the bottle hanging from one hand. “I’m not good at talking, or saying the right shit, like Justin.” His gaze cut to her, and he raised his shoulder in a shrug beneath his jacket. “But I can listen. If you want?”_ _

__Sheri smiled gently, drew a lungful of smoke from the joint and exhaled the pale smoke out over the water, then handed it back to him._ _

__“OK.”_ _

__~  
It was tradition every year, before classes broke for Winter vacation, for the Liberty High cheerleading squad to volunteer together and spread some Christmas cheer. _ _

__In their first year on the squad, Sheri and Chloe spent evenings and weekends collecting donations of flowers leftover from weddings and events around Evergreen county, and delivered them to nursing homes, donning Santa hats and elf-ear headbands with their cheer uniforms as they handed around the bouquets of blooms to excited residents. On Christmas Eve, they decorated the social room of one of the aged care facilities with an eclectic and abundant mix of donated blooms, and volunteered to serve snacks and punch to the residents and their visiting family members, while Bing Crosby sang _White Christmas_ from the stereo system. _ _

__In sophomore year, when Sheri was voted captain, she decided that they would volunteer to help the homeless. The squad ran a collection for second-hand handbags and feminine hygiene products, then set up a production line of fold-out tables in the gymnasium, each of them cycling through the line with a handbag, packing it with bottles of shampoo and conditioner, deodorant, tampons, lip balm, mouthwash, and miniature plastic wrapped candy canes. At the end of the line, they zipped the bag closed, put it in a storage tub along with the others, collected a fresh bag, and started the cycle anew._ _

__On Christmas Eve, they used some of the funds leftover from the Powderpuff football game earlier in the year to hire a bus, and visited women’s organisations and shelters around Oakland, distributing the donations. Their last stop was a shelter for women, children and teens, and after handing over two crates of bags, the girls from the squad served food, bussed and cleaned dishes, and handed out care packages, moving amongst the tables with bright smiles, dressed in their navy and aqua winter season cheer uniforms. The shelter staff had arranged a buffet Christmas dinner, with roast turkey, baked ham, vegetables, and all of the trimmings._ _

__Jess had made a face like she might involuntarily retch in front of the diners when Sheri asked if she wanted to help serve the meat, casting an uncomfortable glance at the sliced ham in the bain-marie, and Chloe offered to trade, slipping off the reindeer-antler headband all of the girls working the tables were wearing, and handing them to the other girl. Jess gratefully settled the antlers in her mane of dark curls, and set out to the nearest table, where a woman in a winter coat sat eating with her two children, bundled in scarves and beanies._ _

__Sheri and Chloe swapped back and forth between stations, chatting with the diners as they served meat and roasted potatoes, carrots, beans and brussels sprouts, and offered helpings of stuffing and lashings of gravy or cranberry sauce. Sheri smiled and clasped the hand of an elderly woman in her both of own, wishing her a merry Christmas, and didn’t notice the next person in the queue right away._ _

__“Hey,” the boy said and, without a shred of hesitation and entirely unabashed, raked his gaze up and down Chloe, where she stood behind the tinfoil roasting pan piled with brussels sprouts. He licked the corner of his mouth suggestively as he returned his gaze to her face. “Can I get some of that?”_ _

__Chloe’s cheeks flared violently pink and Sheri stepped nearer to say something to the boy – in his late teens with a crown of dark, Raphaelite curls and hazel eyes glowing amber with mischief – when the shelter’s volunteer coordinator, a man with dark hair and a heavy beard, spoke loudly from behind the pudding station._ _

__“Jaime, knock it off,” he said, rolling his eyes and nodding his head toward the entrance. “Save that shit for out there. These girls are doing something nice for you.” He cocked an eyebrow. “You remember what that is, right? Doing something nice?” He slopped a serve of custard on top of the slice of pudding he had handed to a woman with unsteady hands and an unruly rats-nest of matted curls. “It’s Christmas, for fuck sake.”_ _

__The boy didn’t look contrite, exactly – it would have been difficult to pull off with the amused smile that he wore as he glanced down at his plate, then up at the girls._ _

__“Sorry, miss,” he said to Chloe, before flicking his gaze to Sheri, a charming grin carving a dimple at the corner of his mouth as he drawled, all languid Latin accent, “I just really like brussels sprouts.”_ _

__Sheri smiled brightly._ _

__“If you like them so much, you should take two servings,” she said, nodding for Chloe to load the entire unoccupied half of the boy’s plate with sprouts. She raised her eyebrows, adding helpfully, “That way, you won’t have to come back for seconds.”_ _

__The boy smirked, and Chloe offered him her best and brightest Liberty cheerleader smile as she added one more sprout to the teetering pile._ _

__“Merry Christmas!”_ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and commenting!
> 
> A very big thanks to [ closetfascination ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetfascination/pseuds/closetfascination) for the beta checking, the encouragement, and for being a fellow fan of Diego and Luke - my underrated faves :)
> 
> The next chapter will be back with Sheri and is written and beta checked, it just needs to be edited, so will be ready for posting next week.
> 
> Thank you for all of your support and encouragement. I hope you and your family have a fantastic Christmas! x


	5. Sheri

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sheri visits the haunts and ghosts of Evergreen.

The motel room was tidy and looked clean, but it smelled like ammonia and a liberal overspray of imitation floral deodoriser, and Sheri couldn’t help but wonder what those scents were intended to hide. She set her bag down on the chair in the corner and poked around a little, checking the bathroom and beneath the bed, but everything looked acceptable, in a mediocre road-side motel sort of way, and as she expected. 

The first night, after the connecting bus trip to Evergreen and then a short Uber ride from the bus station to the motel, the smell had been a momentary distraction. So tired that she could feel it in her joints and pressing behind her eyes, Sheri stood under the weak but mercifully hot spray in the cramped bathroom, head hanging and eyelids lowered, and tried not to fall asleep. 

There was only a bored and disinterested night clerk on duty by the time that she checked in, the scant room service menu unavailable until six the following morning. She could have ordered pizza if she really wanted to, but Sheri dressed in her pyjamas, passed on the complimentary terry-towelling slippers for a pair of her own socks, and padded along the second story walkway to the vending machine by the stairs. As she walked by the doors of the neighbouring motel rooms, the muffled sounds from inside rose and fell – a television talk show, a heated conversation about tipping the waitstaff at dinner, a small child wailing and sniffling inconsolably. Sheri loaded coins into the machine and dispensed a packet of cheese and onion flavoured chips, a sleeve of Skittles, and a can of Diet Coke, and turned back toward her room. 

Her steps slowed for a moment outside of the door where the child was sobbing, but she made herself keep walking.

Sitting cross-legged on the bed, the packet of chips in her lap and The Daily Show playing on the television with the volume muted and closed-captioning turned on, Sheri thumbed open the lock screen on her phone. 

First, she tapped out a text to her father.

**Dad**  
_made it in one piece. Send me a picture of Peach when you wake up?_

She hit send, popped a chip in her mouth, and scrolled back to the texts Chloe had sent her earlier. No doubt, the other girl would be asleep by now. Chloe had offered for her to stay with her family, but something about the idea of Chloe’s family taking care of her – cooking her dinner, laying out fresh towels for her in the morning, brewing coffee and offering her a ride into town – it was more than she thought she could bear without breaking, and she had politely declined. 

She tapped out a brief response. 

**Chloe**  
_hey girl. The ride out was long but fine. Just checked in to the motel. Where do you want to meet Friday morning? And do you want me to bring anything?_

Sheri navigated back to her inbox and bit her lip as her thumb hovered over the scrollbar. 

It was a bad idea – she should just go to sleep – now was not the time to be stumbling through graveyards, not when she was tired and alone and back here, in this place, where so much had gone wrong. 

Resolutely, Sheri locked the screen and set her phone on the small wooden dresser beside the bed. Setting the packet of chips to one side and programming the timer on the television to turn itself off in forty-five minutes, she slid beneath the starchy blankets and reached to turn off the light. 

The pillow smelled like bleach, stain remover, and odour neutralizer. 

As she lay there, eyes closed but her mind jolting and sparking restlessly, the light from the television playing across her eyelids, her phone chimed. Sheri reached to tip the screen toward her, thumbing open the text message from her father. 

The photo, dimly lit, was a selfie taken from above, lying in bed. Her father had one eyebrow arched, unimpressed, while Peach’s nose nuzzled against his ear, her huge head occupying more than half of his pillow. 

A text bubble appeared below the photo containing three short words. 

_we love you_

Sheri dreamed of a man with dark skin and bright eyes the colour of amber. He was dressed in a top-hat adorned with feathers and bones and, in the spaces when she blinked, appeared to wear a face-paint skull. He was tall and broad-shouldered and had a beauty like gravity. She felt something in her chest tugging toward him, and the closer she got, she realised that the smoke rolling and coiling around his legs was shadow.

She was face to face with him when she saw that the shadow wore faces. 

The air the following morning was sharp but not bitterly cold, enough that Sheri felt comfortable in jeans and a sweater as she waited at the road-side stop for the free circuit bus into town. As she walked down the aisle to take a seat toward the back, she wondered where she might have seen the driver before. His face was familiar, but not enough to immediately situate him in a time and place in her mind. She thought on it as she watched the county pass by the window – the industrial area and the navy docks to the south, the foreshore and the boardwalk curving along the coastal edge, hooping around toward the deep green of the forest edging the wealthy suburbs. 

Sheri pressed the button to get off on the main street, and as she dismounted, heard the driver speak behind her.

“Still lookin’ fine, Sheri.”

Frowning, she turned a look over her shoulder at the driver and realised where she recognised the leer. It was bracketed by weathering etched into his skin by a few years of alcohol abuse or drug use or both, but it was his, all the same. 

Sheri shook her head. 

“Still a gentleman, I see, Pratters.”

She figured he might drive the bus she would need to take back to the motel later, so she shoved her hands into the pockets of her sweater to keep from flipping him a one-fingered salute, and stepped off of the bus. 

The main street through town looked much the same. The sheriff’s station had been renovated, a new modern glass façade facing the road, and the Crestmont had signs in the windows advertising new management, but it still looked the same from the sidewalk – the ticket booth facing out into pedestrian traffic, the carpets stained with spilled sodas, the chairs crusted with chewing gum and the glass display case at the confectionary stand stocked with Mike and Ikes and Hot Tamales. Sheri inhaled the scent of buttered popcorn and walked on.

Monet’s was looking slightly worn and lived-in, compared to some of the refurbished buildings on the main road, but it sort of suited the place – the scuffed edges of the wooden tables, the wear on the mismatched stools and chairs from hundreds of visitors, the grey film of chalk residue from updating years of seasonal specials. The staff still dressed in trademark brown uniform shirts, bearing an unchanged logo printed in white, but the art on the walls had been updated. On the back wall of the deck area, a huge and colourful street art piece was hanging, a small black and white portrait shot framed beside it, identifying the artist as Skye Miller. Her hair was longer and she wore fewer piercings, and her face was lit with a pretty smile.

Outside, a whistle sounded, and on the other side of the street, a troupe of boys in Liberty Tigers t-shirts and sweaters jogged along the sidewalk in sets of two and three, their breath fogging in the crisp morning air. 

Zach Dempsey brought up the rear, calling out encouragement and instructions, bringing the whistle that hung from a cord around his neck to the corner of his mouth every so often to get the group’s attention.

Sheri stood by the front window, her arms wrapped around her middle, and watched until they turned a corner at the next traffic intersection.

“Hey.”

Sheri recognised the accent before she turned, all smooth lines and spicy-sweet like cinnamon sugar. 

Diego was perhaps a fraction taller, and his shoulders were heavier with muscle beneath the plaid fabric of his shirt, but the warm, dark eyes and the dimple at the edge of his smile were unchanged. He wore a high-visibility vest in a bright shade of yellow over his shirt, steel-toed work boots, and was carrying a cardboard tray of takeaway coffees in one hand. 

Sheri unwound her arms from across her midsection and didn’t need to say anything. He was warm and smelled like plaster dust, peppermint chewing gum, and cologne with an undertone of cedarwood when she stepped into him, tucking her head beneath his chin as his spare arm wrapped around her shoulders. 

“Chloe said you were coming into town, for-“ He bit the rest of the sentence off, and his jaw flexed where his chin rested on the crown of her head. “You see her, yet?”

Sheri shook her head, stepping back. 

“No,” she said. “We’re going to meet at the gates tomorrow.” She tipped her head, smiling politely. “Do you need a ride?”

Diego grinned, raising one shoulder in a shrug.

“Chloe already asked,” he said with a light chuckle. “But I’m good. I got a way there.”

Sheri nodded, biting her lip. She didn’t want this to be awkward. It wasn’t; it had no reason to be. They were just two people who had known each other as kids, who had been on a date, once, meeting again in a coffee shop.

In a town full of ghosts.

“How’s the business going?” she asked, aiming for light and conversational – they could pretend, for a moment, that so much and so many weren’t lost to them. “You guys busy?”

He smiled ruefully, shaking his head.

“Busier than I can keep up with,” he said, waving his spare hand in mild frustration. “All these people watching HGTV, thinking they can have a Hamptons kitchen and open plan living for five-grand and a one-week turnaround.” 

Sheri raised a teasing eyebrow.

“I mean, all the _Property Brothers_ do is sledgehammer a couple of walls, right?”

He laughed and shrugged.

“Yeah, well, Luke does make quick work of that part, I gotta admit.”

Diego shook his head, amused, and then paused, a smile lingering at the corner of his mouth as he considered her.

“You know-“ He hesitated, bashful, a hint of pink rising in his cheeks. “If you wanted to, we could catch up? Maybe grab a milkshake at Rosie’s?” He grinned, just as beautiful as he had been back then. “I’ll take your advice and get the chocolate, this time.”

Her heart swelled and cracked, all at once, and Sheri slid her hands into the front pocket of her sweater, clasping her fingers around the tiny crystal bottle of perfume, the carved flower motif of the stopper pressed hard into her palm. 

“Sure. Maybe.” She shook her head, laughing at her jumbled response, and settled on, “That’d be nice.”

The corner of Diego’s mouth tugged upwards, and he ducked his head in a nod.

“Well, I still have the same number, so you just let me know, OK?” He stepped around her, turning to speak over his shoulder as he headed for the door, waving his free hand in the direction of the counter. “Put your order on my account. It’s Torres-Polanco Construction.”

Sheri rubbed the pad of her thumb in circles around the bottom of the perfume bottle while she stood at the counter and ordered a sandwich, an oatmeal muffin, and a green tea to go. She took out her purse to pay, but the barista, a middle-aged woman with rosy cheeks, shook her head.

“I put it on his account, like he said,” she advised with a wink. 

Sheri felt her cheeks warm but smiled and nodded, and put her purse away. 

Standing off to the left of the counter to wait, she stood by the machines, listening to them roar and hiss, belching steam as the baristas cranked levers and turned dials. Behind the counter was a small display of newspaper and magazine articles pinned to the wall, a kind of miniature hall of fame – a picture of Scott Reed wearing a university baseball uniform, a headline proclaiming Marcus Cole voted in as the youngest member of the local council in a town in Seattle, a clipping from a local paper with a photo of Charlie St George and Ani Achola on campus at Harvard beneath the headline _Evergreen’s Ivy League_ , and a photograph that Tyler Down had won a national award for. 

Watching the blonde woman preparing coffee beans for the next customer’s order while her tea brewed, Sheri bit the inside of her lip for a moment, then stepped forward. 

“This is going to sound really weird,” she said, smiling apologetically. “But I wonder if you could do me a favour?”

The Blue Spot Liquor Store was like a picture book page preserved outside of time. The narrow aisles were still stacked bountifully with colourful packets of candy and brightly wrapped chocolate bars, bags of chips and savoury treats, pantry items and cleaning products, and lined with fridges full of soda, beer and pre-mixed bottles of alcohol. Even Wally, face full of wrinkles and wearing the same navy puffer-vest she had seen him in a thousand times before, was like a snapshot from her high school years. 

“Hey, Wally,” she smiled, and he peered at her from behind his glasses for a moment, then broke into a grin.

“Oh, hey,” he said with a chuckle. “Long time no see.”

Sheri nodded at the shelves over his shoulder. 

“Do you sell those Robustos as singles?”

Wally cocked a fuzzy eyebrow behind his glasses, turning to select one from the shelf. When he turned back to her and saw her drawing her Florida driver’s licence from her purse, he waved a hand dismissively, placing the cellophane-wrapped cylinder on the counter. 

“Never took you for a smoker,” he said, punching the keys of the cash register. He tipped his head toward the thick cigar. “’specially not these.”

Sheri chuckled, handing him a couple of bills, and plucked the cigar from the counter.

“It’s not for me,” she reassured him as he rang up the sale. “It’s for a friend.”

It was a relief when she boarded the bus outside of the tourist centre and found a portly woman behind the wheel. She wasn’t certain that she would have been able to restrain herself if she had to listen to another lewd or suggestive comment from Pratters. 

It had been years since she had ridden this route, but it felt familiar, the municipal buildings and stores – some signage and shop-front displays changed, like the Baker’s Drug Store, now a bathroom supply business advertising tiles and tapware in the windows – the parks and playgrounds, and then, as they travelled further toward the edge of town, the houses – cottages and bungalows, the odd duplex - and, after that, the trees, soaring skyward, their branches arching over the road, the view outside the window a dense, glossy green. 

It had rained on and off over the past week, and the path was damp and a little loose underfoot as she set out, the bus rumbling away from the stop behind her. The woods were quiet, the cool breeze gently rustling amongst the leaves, and a bird singing a cheery but solitary tune somewhere in the distance. The first time she had come out here, they had misread the signs and doubled back before they found where they were going, and the corner of Sheri’s mouth twitched upwards as she reached the weathered sign. Someone had helpfully notched an arrow into the aged wood, pointing the way. 

When the woods fell away, opening to the sky above and the water below, the air was crisp and clear, the damp, heavy odour of wet leaf litter and dirt giving way to the clean scent of pine and distant rain. Sheri stepped carefully, avoiding the slippery wet patches on the rocks as she made her way down to the rockpools. They were filled to the brim, topped up by the recent rain, but she couldn’t see any movement below the surface of the water. The waterhole itself was still and glassy, a dark, saturated silver, reflecting the sky above, the branches of the trees at its rim casting shadows like cracks in a fine china bowl. 

Sheri sat on a rock overlooking the sheer drop and unwrapped her oat muffin. She set the sandwich down beside her, tugged open the paper wrapping to reveal the thickly spread egg salad inside, and slipped her phone from her pocket to take a picture. She clicked to share and tapped out a text to her dad. 

_eating egg salad sandwiches without peach. don’t tell her_

The reply was prompt and came attached with a photo of Peach’s big sad eyes.

_She’ll smell it on you when you get home. You know they’re her favourite_

Sheri smiled, popping a piece of muffin into her mouth, and navigated back to the text conversations. Without conscious thought, she scrolled backwards, from texts to her dad and Chloe, to her classmates, chatting about projects and tests, her supervisor offering shifts and her colleagues coordinating rides to work sites, back through friends she wished she was better at keeping in touch with – a text from Jess almost a year ago, accompanied by a selfie of her sitting in a coffee shop around the corner from Berkley with Alex and a boy with a dark mop of curls who Jess identified as Winston, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth while Alex wore that familiar, half-reluctant smile. A string of photos from Courtney the summer before, when she and her girlfriend had gone backpacking through Europe and met up with Ryan in Paris. 

And back further, to conversations untouched for more than two years, now. 

To final texts, last words, memories and regrets. 

_so, I’m sitting here staring this fancy white tuxedo, prom is like half over already, jess is probably dancing with some other guy and having an amazing time, and I need you to tell me what I should do_

She navigated back, and scrolled further, to another boy, another text she had no way of knowing at the time would be the last, a typically acidic answer to her question about a message sent to her in Spanish, and didn’t trust Google to accurately translate. 

_who tf sent you that? diego? lol what a simp. it means your smile makes him happy_

She scrolled again, further, _years_ , to find the oldest untouched text conversation in her inbox, the final instalment received over years ago, one she had missed, busy styling her hair or something unimportant like that, and had regretted every day since, because maybe if she had gone with him, everything would have been different. 

_hey you need a ride to jess’s party tomorrow night? i’ll be out your way, picking up Troy. Let me know :)_

Sheri drew her knees to her chest, looking out over the still silver surface of the waterhole, her chest feeling deep and hollow behind her ribs, like a black hole, threatening to draw in everything beautiful and alive. She took a slow breath, the crisp air scorching the back of her throat, and blew it out, warm, between her lips. 

She scrolled again and tapped out another message.

**Diego**  
_I’m in town till Sunday. Let me know when you’re free. Shakes are on me._

That night, Sheri dreamed of the baron again, his eyes glowing like fireflies in his skull-face war-paint. The shadows crouching at his feet were dark but still, enough that she could make out features – one with a bright, kind smile, another wearing a sprinkle of freckles, the third watching her with clearwater blue eyes. From a distance, they had seemed agitated or afraid, but standing before the baron, she could see that they were soothed by his presence. Peaceful. And safe.

She woke feeling calm. 

The spray of the motel shower was weak and narrow, but it was hot, and Sheri turned her face upwards, the water like needles against her eyelids. It was colder than the previous morning and she turned on the heat while she got dressed, the warm, stale air whispering from the vents around her legs and arms as she slid into her dress and sat on the edge of the bed to slip on a pair of tights. Standing in front of the mirror, she finger-combed her hair, longer than she had ever worn it before, and carefully sectioned it into a tidy braid. She retrieved the black clutch from the bottom of her backpack and packed it carefully – the napkin from Monet’s, its corners twisted to secure it closed, the cigar from Wally, a miniature bottle of rum from the motel minibar, the tiny crystal bottle of perfume. She added her phone, a small fold of loose bills and her motel room key, and stepped outside. 

The morning sky was a flat, featureless silver, bright and clear overhead as she watched the quiet streets through the bus window. Outside, the town was just beginning to stir, lights on in kitchen windows, garage doors rolling open as early risers began the commute to jobs in the city, joggers exercising dogs on leashes and cats finding their way home after a night of exploring the neighbourhood in the dark. 

The nearest stop was at the foot of the hill, but that was OK. 

The walk was quiet, the roads shadowed by tall trees, their dark leaves whispering in the morning breeze. Sheri followed a winding path, each step slow but sure. She had walked this route before, a hundred times or more. She knew the way. 

Although they had agreed that they would meet at the gates, Sheri couldn’t seem to anchor herself there, her feet carrying her over the threshold and along the path, worn soft and flat by thousands of footsteps. This high up, near the crest of the hill, she could see over the tops of the towering trees, and the town sprawling into the distance, the rooftops of homes and businesses, Liberty High and its green sports fields, Mercy Hospital on the far edge, and the cliff-top lookout, the waterhole nestled in the trees at his base. 

The path to the Catholic section was laid with mulch and familiar underfoot. Sheri followed it through the plots, a patchwork of additions and expansions, winding footpaths and short stacks of stairs for access to newly established sections added as the grounds grew with the town. She passed beneath the shadow of a weeping angel and turned left at the stone carving of the Virgin Mary, her face and clothing mottled with spreading moss. 

Twelve plots south, she sank onto the stone bench, cold and familiar beneath her, and sat quietly while the sky overhead gradually deepened to a bright, saturated blue. 

“Hey.”

Sheri turned at the soft voice behind her. Chloe smiled, her eyes the deep, heavy blue of the mid-morning sky, and lifted her fingers in a small wave. She wore a black pencil skirt and blouse, her blonde hair secured in a casual twist. She had a Liberty Tigers varsity jacket folded over one arm and a posy of flowers wrapped loosely with twine in the opposite hand. It appeared hand-picked, an eclectic arrangement of rosemary sprigs, jasmine coils, and pink and white roses. 

“Sorry,” Sheri said quietly, brushing the edge of her eye with the pad of her thumb. “I know we said we’d meet at the gate.”

Chloe shrugged and moved to her side. 

“It’s OK,” she said, gently. “You weren’t hard to find.”

Carefully, Chloe laid the jacket on the bench beside Sheri, and then worked to unwind the twine securing the posy of flowers. With practiced fingers, she separated out a small sprig, two roses framed with rosemary and jasmine. 

“Where did you get them?” Sheri asked, watching her set the remaining flowers down on the bench by the jacket. “They’re lovely.”

Chloe smiled, plucking a couple of dried spines from the rosemary. She inhaled the scent of the posy, the delicate perfume of the roses, the heavy sweetness of the jasmine, and the deep tang of the rosemary.

“Around,” she said.

As Chloe laid the flowers, gently and thoughtfully, nestled in the considerately maintained grass, Sheri reached into her clutch and retrieved the twisted pouch of the napkin from Monet’s. 

Sheri looked down at the headstone. She knew the edge of every letter, could have traced the shape of the stone in her sleep, and would have been able to describe every shade of grey that made up its face and how they would change as the sun moved overhead. Back when it happened, she would spend almost as much time here as she did with the Cantrells, sometimes leaving campus right after homeroom, where he had once sat in the desk in front of her, his face always lit with a bright smile as he turned to offer her gum or ask her what she had scored on last week’s Biology test, and could lose an entire day sitting on the stone bench.

As silly as the thought felt, at the time, she hadn’t wanted him to lie there alone.

With a careful touch, she unwound the corners and moved to Chloe’s side to lay it open upon the upper edge of the headstone. Its face was lovingly maintained, and she knew the etching by heart.

_Jeffrey Luis Atkins_  
_1999 – 2017_  
_Beloved son and cherished friend_

Chloe peered into the twist of the napkin, raising her eyebrows with interest at the little stack of coffee beans lying inside. 

“A gift?” Chloe asked.

Sheri nodded, looking up at the other girl.

“To keep him safe, and resting peacefully,” she said.

Chloe’s smile was gentle and sad, and when her gaze drifted over Sheri’s shoulder, she turned to see the Walker family crypt at the crest of the hill, the private plot and the headstones that surrounded the structure enclosed by a dutifully maintained ring of blooming peonies, daylilies, and irises in shades of purple, yellow, and white. 

“Do you want to go over?” Sheri asked, nodding at the remaining blooms laying on the bench beside the varsity jacket. “I’ll go with you, if you do.”

Chloe shook her head, the corner of her mouth slipping upwards in a small smile.

“No,” she said, turning to retrieve the jacket and the flowers, and looking over her shoulder at the other girl. “Thank you, though.”

Sheri lifted her shoulder in a shrug. Once upon a time, this spot on the hill had been frightening, full of blame and sorrow and recrimination, the final resting place of so many – too many – people she had known and hadn’t done enough to save. Often, she had forced herself to endure on her own, a self-administered punishment that always failed to salve the guilt. Now, she realised that there was no need to feel that way, but it had helped, back then, when Peach would climb into the backseat of her father’s SUV, and they would walk up the hill together, the large dog settling into the grass at her feet, quiet and comforting. 

It was one of the reasons why, when Chloe had asked her to come, she had agreed. 

She didn’t want the other girl to carry her guilt and sorrow in this place, alone. 

“Should we head down?” Chloe suggested, glancing at the delicate watch at her wrist. “I told Diego we’d meet him there-“ She paused to smile, gentle and bright, and extend her hand to the other girl, “-and I’m afraid he wouldn’t think to look up here.”

Sheri nodded, casting one last glance at the headstone, then reached to take Chloe’s hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you all had a lovely Christmas!
> 
> Thank you very much to closetfascination for the beta checking and chats!
> 
> Next week will be another set of mini-scenes - all of them filling in spaces and linking in to previous fics - and then back with Chloe as we start to shift the timeline backwards a little bit and fill in some details about what the girls are back in Evergreen for, and why. 
> 
> Thank you, as always, for reading and commenting x


	6. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next collection of mini-scenes, in no particular order:
> 
> \- Chloe & Justin - fleshing out on of Chloe's dizzy descriptions (Dizzy)  
> \- Justin & Sheri - filling in a moment from Kitana  
> \- Monty & Chloe - referencing Dizzy

Chloe’s heart roared in her chest like a jet engine.

On the other side of the doors, the basketball stadium echoed with cheers and hollering as the student body president – a senior Chloe had never met and couldn’t, in that moment, remember the name of – amped up the crowd with anticipation for the announcement of the selections for the junior varsity basketball team. The pep rally was the first of the season, and Chloe’s first appearance on the cheer squad. 

“Make sure to keep up your smiles,” the captain reminded them as they stood in the hallway outside of the doors like gladiators awaiting their fate in the arena, adjusting their ponytails and false eyelashes, straightening their skirts and retying their shoelaces. “Even if you fuck it up.” Her voice had a warning edge, and she looked down the line at each of them. “You land on your ass, you better do it with a smile.”

Angie Romero, standing in line ahead of Chloe, cast a look over her shoulder, arching one perfectly pencilled eyebrow, her lips stained a deep red and glossy like a cherry. 

“ _Seig heil,_ captain,” Angie muttered, her voice thick with sarcasm, as the squad captain walked down the line of anxious girls. 

Chloe smiled back weakly, her stomach twisting with nerves. 

She hadn’t thought that Angie paid any attention in History. The presentation she had given the week before on the socio-economic impacts of wartime Germany implementing segregation and ghetto systems had been lifted almost word for word from Wikipedia.

Chloe clung tightly to her poms and tried to calm her racing heart rate. She had rehearsed the routine for weeks, with the squad and in front of the mirror in her bedroom. She practiced her smile until she could hold it like a mask over her concentration, or her frustration with herself when she fumbled a step. Honestly, she would have been more comfortable giving Angie’s presentation than she felt right now.

 _It’s just a cartwheel,_ she reminded herself, uselessly. _You’ve done a million of them. It’s just one more_. At the end of the line, the squad captain loudly instructed Sheri to retie the Liberty Tigers blue ribbon in her hair, which sent a wave of activity along the queue as the other girls all reflexively checked their own. _Calm down,_ Chloe insisted, reaching up to check her own ribbon was secure. _It’s not even about you._

As if on cue, the junior varsity team poured from the changerooms, and the squad captain redirected her attention to them, directing each boy to his partner like a drill sergeant, snatching Zach Dempsey by the elbow when he made a half step in the wrong direction and tugging him back. Zach, towering almost two clear feet over her, blushed and sheepishly followed her instructions. 

Chloe plastered the smile that she had been practicing on her face as her partner approached her, and hoped that he couldn’t see the tremble in it.

“Hey,” Justin said, with an easy grin, and glanced at the doors ahead of them as the crowd began to clap and cheer in earnest, ready for their entrance. His pale blue eyes slid in her direction. “You nervous?”

Chloe blinked, shook her head firmly as the squad captain trotted by on her way to the head of the line to lead them off, but admitted quietly, “I’m terrified.”

Justin shrugged casually. His uniform was brand new and slightly too big for him, his sneakers a bright, untouched white. He offered her another smile, this one focused and brilliant.

“What’s there to be scared about?” he asked, and beneath his playful tone, Chloe heard a slight flutter and realised that he was nervous, too. 

“I’m afraid I’m going to fall on my ass,” Chloe admitted, “And it’ll just be me, out there on my own in front of all of those people, looking like an idiot.”

Justin chuckled, peering along the hallway as the team captain’s name was announced, and he and the squad captain headed out onto the basketball court to a swell of cheers. 

“It’s just, like, a handstand, right?” he asked with a grin. “Even I can do a handstand.”

Chloe shook her head.

“ _No_. The routine is - every third cheerleader has to do a cartwheel,” she explained, as the second pair headed out onto the court, the audience stamping their feet and clapping to celebrate their entrance. “First does a front handspring, second does a back walkover, and third does a cartwheel.” 

They watched the third pair jog out to the court, the cheerleader’s hands raised, poms quivering, her steps carefully counted and measured. Chloe and Justin both leaned from the queue to peer out through the doors as the girl took a couple of quick bounds ahead of her allocated basketball player, and leapt into an aerial cartwheel. It was met with screams and thrilled applause.

“Shit,” Justin raised his eyebrows, impressed, and looked at Chloe. “You’re gonna do that?”

Chloe flushed pale as her throat tightened with anxiety.

“Jesus Christ, no,” she breathed, as the next pair trotted out, and they shuffled along the hallway toward the doors. “I’ll use my hands.” She shrugged, biting her lip. “Well, hopefully. If not, I guess I’ll be using my face.”

Justin glanced sidelong at her, his clearwater blue eyes tracing her profile, the nervous quiver of her lower lip, the anxious stutter of her breath on each exhale, and he offered a small smile, nudging her elbow with his own. 

“You’re gonna stick left, yeah?”

Chloe frowned, panic battling with confusion as the pair ahead of them jogged out through the doors to booming applause. 

“No, I go _ahead_ of you,” she corrected, frantically, peering out at the crowd, her blue eyes wide with terror. “Holy shit.”

“Hey,” Justin drew her focus, meeting her gaze. “Just stay left,” he instructed, gently, then broken into a cheeky grin. “And if you do fall on your ass, I promise you won’t be on your own.”

Chloe shook her head.

“But-“

“ **Justiiiinnnnn Foooleeeyyyy**!!”

Justin grinned at her, and before she could stop him – and despite what she had instructed – trotted out ahead of her, veering right. 

Panic forced the automatic part of her brain to take over, and Chloe felt her feet moving without conscious thought. The steps she had counted out a thousand times, one-two-three, her trajectory angling instinctively left as Justin’s reminder echoed in the silence of her terrified mind, and then tipping smoothly forward, onto her hands, the stadium swirling around her the way that the skatepark had, all those nights that she practiced along the edge of the bowl, while Monty lay at the bottom, his feet propped on his skateboard and his phone playing _Goldfinger_ , and the sky above them faded from the burnt apricot of sunset to a deep, saturated navy. 

When she stuck the landing and could breathe again, Chloe realised that the crowd was laughing, and turned her head to her right, confused, in time to watch Justin’s unsteady handstand topple him directly onto his ass in the middle of the court. His cheeks were a little pink, but that seemed to be a result of the blood rushing to his head, his face lit with a bright grin as she helped him to his feet. 

They jogged, shoulder to shoulder, to join their teammates, and although the squad captain shot them both daggers, Chloe couldn’t help but giggle as Justin winced, and reached down to rub his backside gingerly. 

“Handstands are harder than I remember,” he laughed as his teammates slapped him on the back and offered fist bumps. When they had settled, Justin glanced at her, and beneath the roar of the crowd reassured her, with a smile, “You did good.”

Chloe smiled, her heartbeat finally easing to a strong, steady rhythm.

“Thanks.”

~

The fair was a sprawl of colour strewn across the Liberty High School football field below, a patchwork of stall canopies, food truck roofs, pick-up truck trays and the farm animal petting zoo in the northern corner. The enclosure was carefully laid with heavy tarpaulins and a generous layer of hay to protect the pitch before the animals were brought in – piglets and chickens, two baby goats, a lamb, three ducks, a goose and a rooster. The light breeze carried the smells up to them – chili dogs and nachos, Karen Dempsey’s steamed dumplings, diesel generators, freshly ground coffee, hot buttered popcorn, and barnyard animal droppings.

Looking down from above, the people browsing the stalls and attractions were reduced to shapes, colours and movement, without faces or personalities and lives, and Sheri sort of liked it that way. If they weren’t somebody, then nothing could happen to them. If they didn’t have lives, they could be endless. 

“Are you scared?”

Sheri looked at Justin. Backlit by the brilliant morning sun and the endless blue sky, his eyes seemed bright and piercing as he peered at her with concern.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, and waved a hand to decline when he offered her the bag of cinnamon sugar donut holes they had been sharing. “Not scared.” She looked down between her sneakers at the people far below, buying coffee and jars of homemade chili oil, hand-crafted soy candles and potted plants. “I guess just sad.”

She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t felt sad.

She still felt happy sometimes, and relieved, tired and joyous and angry and frustrated. But the sadness lay beneath them like a foundation, tinting every other feeling and emotion to shades of blue. 

And now, Sheri was moving across the country, away from the town she had grown up in, the friends she had made, and her mother who, when Sheri had called to ask to meet for coffee, had insisted she was too busy, and after Sheri had told her then, over the phone, that she was moving to Florida with her father to care for her aunt, had paused for a moment and then said, “Fine. Was that all?”

Technically, at seventeen, the relocation required her mother’s permission.

Sheri figured her indifference was close enough. 

“Yeah,” Justin said, brushing cinnamon sugar from his knuckles. “I get it.”

Of course he did. 

He always had. 

Sheri patted his knee beneath the safety bar of the Ferris Wheel seat, which swung gently with the crisp morning breeze as they teetered at the top. It wasn’t very tall, a carnival ride capable of being assembled quickly and transported from one fairground to the next, but it towered over the miniature rollercoaster, the cars far too small for any riders over the age of ten, and the tilt-a-whirl, which sent screams and laughter spinning into the air. 

“How are things with the Jensens?” she asked with a smile and nudged his elbow with hers. “Mrs Jensen looked so proud of you, helping her out at the stall…“

She giggled as Justin rolled his eyes and grinned bashfully.

“Shut up,” he muttered, embarrassed, and shook his head. “It’s fine,” he said, looking down into the bag of donut holes. “You know. It’s whatever.”

Sheri cocked an eyebrow at him, and Justin sighed, relenting.

“It’s kind of amazing,” he said quietly, as if it were a secret that he didn’t want anyone to overhear. “They have dinner together every night, and eat breakfast together at the kitchen table every morning. If I don’t text to say I’m going out, Matt or Lainie call to make sure I’m OK.” Justin shook his head, bewildered. “They check if I’ve done my homework and Matt came to parent-teacher night and like, asked Mrs Baxter how they can help get my History grade up and shit.” 

He chuckled, and opened his mouth as if to continue, the well of positive interactions and experiences deep and fresh, but sobered, biting his lip instead. 

“I’m scared that one day they’re going to realize they made a mistake,” he said, a true whisper this time, creeping unbidden from the dark and fiercely protected place deep inside of him. “That I don’t deserve all of this.”

Sheri slipped her hand into his and squeezed gently. Justin looked at her, terrified.

“I think I might love them,” he said, like an admission of terrible guilt, like he was confessing to murder, and Sheri smiled, squeezing his fingers tightly.

“I think you do,” she agreed, matter-of-factly. “And I think they love you, too.”

Justin shook his head, looking down at the field below their feet, where Lainie’s cupcake stand had attracted a little family of four.

“How the fuck am I meant to earn that?” he asked, equal parts rhetorical and despair. When Sheri laughed, he turned a wild look in her direction.

“You don’t have to earn it,” she said, gently but firmly. “That’s the whole point.”

Justin blinked at her, silent, his forehead creased with a frown. Beneath them, the seat jerked, and then swayed softly as the Ferris Wheel began turning again. 

“What the hell am I meant to do when you’re gone?” he asked, his voice low and sombre, and Sheri shrugged, plucking a donut hole from the bag and popping it into her mouth and tonguing it to one side.

“Call. Text. Tag me in all your Instagram photos. Send me postcards,” she answered practically, then paused, chewing thoughtfully. His hand was warm around her fingers, and his eyes a very clear, brilliant blue when she met his gaze. “Miss me.”

Justin’s cheek dimpled with a smile, and he nodded.

“Alright,” he agreed. “As long as you promise to miss me, too.”

Sheri grinned, and swiped at the end of his nose with her fingertip, dusting it with sticky cinnamon sugar.

“Always.”

~

The one constant sound, ebbing and flowing but never ceasing, was the squealing. 

It was worst in the room they had hired, a windowless space with netting hung low from the ceiling, twined with leaves and flowers in an artificial, middle-school art project sort of impression of a forest glen. The squeals echoed from the walls and were trapped by the low-hanging canopy, which created a kind of echo chamber of excited, girlish glee. 

The table that ran the room’s length was set low to the ground, lined on both sides with wide pillows in shades of pink and green and flecked with sequins. The table itself was painted a shimmering blossom pink, and set with plastic plates pattern with blossoms. Down the middle of the table, a procession of treats had been laid – three-tiered displays of tea sandwiches and miniature quiches, heaping trays of chicken fingers, pizza slices, cookies and Rice Krispy treats. A vase set in the middle of the table was filled with cake-pops decorated to look like flowers, and surrounded by a ring of butterfly cupcakes, delicately arranged and dusted with confectioners’ sugar and edible glitter. 

The spread had all looked quite lovely when their hosts, two bored teenage girls wearing sparkly tutus and flat, artificial smiles, had set it out, wincing every time that they leaned down to set a plate on the table and were rewarded with a piercing, excited shriek as one girl or another pointed out, as shrill and loud as possible, that there was fairy dust on the pizza or the chicken fingers – actually a liberal dusting of edible glitter. 

Jesus Christ, the glitter. 

Louise was quite sure that the owners of the fairy grotto must have shopped for glitter at the same bulk-buy store that supplied strip clubs. 

It was everywhere – dusted across the surface of the table, sprinkled over the cushions, stuck on the plates, clinging to their hands and faces, mixed in with the ketchup and floating in the soda. Louise was quite sure that she had inhaled enough to create an artificial clot in her lungs, and as one of the party hosts – the girl with long black hair and a green tulle fairy outfit to match her sparkling wings – announced that it was time for the birthday girl to select a gift from the store, and a chorus of high-pitched screams filled the room, raising the air pressure to suffocating intensity, she wondered if keeling over with a glittery death croak would be so bad after all.

Chloe took the hand that the part host offered her, and as her party guests climbed from their cushions to follow, cast a look over her shoulder, raising a questioning eyebrow. Louise smiled tightly, a headache scraping like an ice-pick behind her eyes so that it looked almost more like a wince, and waved for her to go ahead. The other little girls, wearing a rainbow of tutus pulled up over their clothes and lopsided wings crafted from coat-hangers, pantyhose and glitter glue, marched out into the store behind her, chattering excitedly about whether she should pick a wand or a snow-globe, or maybe one of those little fairy doors that fixed to the skirting boards. 

The room was suddenly, mercifully quiet, and Louise retrieved her handbag from beneath the table, slipping free a packet of aspirin and popping two from the blister packaging. Before her, the table was a warzone of excitedly spilled drinks, half-eaten food, wayward smears of ketchup and dropped food, slices of pizza and butterfly cupcakes landing upside down and left to their fate. Louise thought that if someone had shown her the scene, and told her that a band of rabid racoons had broken in and created the chaos laid in front of her, she would have believed it without question. The only tidy, untouched corner of the room was the small display table by the door, where the loot bags stood in neat rows beside the birthday cake stood – a multi-tiered sponge she had ordered from the Walplex, frosted with a pastel unicorn design and awaiting the sparkly pink number 9 candle she had found at the dollar store. 

Louise realised that they still had to get through singing _Happy Birthday_ , and her eyes darted desperately around the table for a drink to wash down the aspirin that wasn’t from a cup smeared with ketchup or containing a floating chunk of sandwich, dropped during excited conversation and left to become bloated with soda. 

Sitting quietly on a purple cushion beside the pink stack of pillows Chloe had been perched atop – a fairy grotto throne for the birthday girl – Monty took his plastic cup and slid it in her direction. It was half empty, and the liquid inside was violently orange and swirling with glitter, but it was the cleanest option within reach. Louise tipped the aspirin into her mouth, took the cup, and washed them down. 

The boy glanced at the doorway to the fairy store, where the party guests – girls from Chloe’s classes at school and ballet, and her gymnastics team - were screaming suggestions at Chloe, then turned back to the table. He was dressed in his standard fare – old jeans and a plaid shirt patterned in white, yellow and navy – and sprouting from his back, a pair of orange wings, decorated with sparkling swirls and flower motifs. He had refused a tutu, and the party hosts hadn’t argued, offering a silver plastic tiara, which now perched in his hair, the gaudy plastic gems set in it the same shade as abrasion at his hairline. He leaned forward to take the one remaining butterfly cupcake that hadn’t been smashed, dropped or otherwise fondled, and set about plucking off its wings, glitter sparkling between the freckles on his cheeks as he popped one in his mouth.

“Chloe said you wanted her to have this party last year,” Monty said, sliding his gaze along the table to Louise. “But she wanted to go bowling instead.”

Louise watched the boy pluck the remaining wing from the cupcake and pop it in his mouth. She thought of the previous year, when she had been determined that Chloe should try to make friends with the girls in her classes, but in the end, had given in and taken her and Monty to the bowling alley on a Thursday night, when they turned all the houselights down, and the lanes, pins and balls glowed neon under blacklights. 

It hadn’t seemed enough, back then – Chloe’s first birthday party since they had left Gavin, and missing all of the friends and overabundance and fanfare of every party they had thrown her before – but sitting in the wreckage of the fairy grotto, that night seemed perfect. Just the two kids, those silly rental shoes, the bumper-rails glowing fluorescent green and hotdogs delivered to the lane. After paying for the game and food, Louise hadn’t been able to afford a cake, but now, having saved for three months to rent the fairy grotto, the one-dollar ice cream cones they had gone out for after bowling didn’t seem so disappointing. Chloe had been so excited that she had dropped her cone after only one lick, and while Louise had been frustrated and heartbroken, staring down at the smashed ice cream at their feet, Monty had just grinned and handed Chloe his. 

Monty peeled the paper wrapper from his cupcake leisurely, enjoying the quiet in the room while the girls shouted and screamed outside. 

“Maybe next year, we could go to crazy golf?”

Louise downed the rest of the obnoxiously sugary orange soda and set the cup down on the table.

“Deal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologise if you got this chapter update notification more than once - a few copies got jammed up as a result of the site being down and my impatience :)
> 
> Thank you to [ closetfascination ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetfascination/pseuds/closetfascination) for the beta checking and chats! If you aren't already, you should pop over to her profile and read her fics :)
> 
> Next up will be Chloe, with a bit of an explanation of what they're doing, why and with who, and the importance of having something to remember the departed by. 
> 
> Thank you, as always, for reading and commenting! x


	7. Chloe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chloe considers the importance of loss, and having something to remember loved ones by. 
> 
> note: although one of these scenes is set in 2020, I haven't incorporated COVID. I think that the story feels sombre enough without it.

**October 2020**

The first Halloween that the two girls spent together was also the first time Chloe saw Myah cry.

It caught Chloe by surprise. Myah laughed loudly and unapologetically. She raised her voice when boys and men tried to speak over her, even when they were faculty. She shouted when she was angry, refusing to fold down her emotions to something other people found inoffensive. She was fierce and passionate and gave all of herself to the people she loved and the causes she believed in. Myah ached for the injustices faced by people she would never even know, and felt seared by how little she could do to help the people that she did. But Chloe had never seen her sad, the way that she was that day. 

Chloe was making the most of fall and wrapped a soft, chunky knitted scarf around her neck and shoulders before setting out to buy them coffees from the café on campus – a little treat on a grey and blustery morning. They both had papers to write and submission dates looming, but there was a party off campus that they had reluctantly agreed to show their faces at, and that meant making an early start on their assessments in exchange for a few hours of cheap beer, poor quality weed, and ironic, low effort costumes. 

She was well aware that, dressed in leggings, boots and an oversized cable-knit sweater, her hair knotted into two loose braids beneath her beanie and carrying two huge takeaway cups steaming with the scent of cinnamon and nutmeg, she looked like she had chosen the most basic white girl imaginable as her Halloween costume, but Chloe couldn’t quite bring herself to care. She grinned as she bumped open the door to the dormitory hall with her hip, thinking of the best way to wake her roommate – sitting on the end of her bed and slurping her own coffee loudly, or perhaps wafting the takeaway cup by Myah’s sleeping face, until the temptation of pumpkin-spiced goodness was too much to resist. 

When she nudged open the door to their room, and found Myah’s bed empty, the covers shoved back and no sign of the other girl, Chloe hesitated, her bubble of anticipation burst. Beneath the clutter of potted succulents, markers and spray paint cans, candles and trinkets, one of the drawers in the unit on Myah’s side of the room was pulled open, and from the untidy bundles of tops and t-shirts inside, a random assortment of garments spilled out over the edge, as if something had been tugged free, sudden and desperate. Chloe glanced around the room, but other than the abandoned drawer, she couldn’t identify anything missing or out of place. 

“She’s in the bathroom.” 

Chloe looked down the hall in the direction of the voice. A Pharmacy major she shared a couple of lab sessions with lingered in the doorway to her own room, dressed in a fluffy pink unicorn onesie, in honour of the holiday. The girl frowned, her expression an odd mixture of curious and uncomfortable. 

“I think there’s something wrong with her.” She raised her eyebrow. “It sounded like she was crying.”

Immediately, Chloe understood the other girl’s bewilderment. Myah was known for her buzzed hair, her unapologetically eclectic style, and her fiery personality. She was known for welcoming new residents to the dorm with chipped coffee mugs planted with succulent cuttings and an invitation to join the campus mental health peer support group. She was known for leading the student body’s peaceful and powerful Black Lives Matter demonstrations and recruiting every single member of the varsity football team to her cause. She was known for spending a week relentlessly tracking down the culprit when her clothes had been taken, still damp, from a dryer in the shared laundry room and dumped to the side so that someone else could use the machine, and confronting the girl responsible by marching into the middle of a Theology lecture, pointing with one black-varnished fingernail at the painting of the crucifixion projected at the front of the room, and demanded to know if _Jesus_ would have behaved so selfishly with somebody else’s laundry.

She was not a girl who made a habit of weeping in bathroom stalls. 

Chloe put the coffee cups down on the edge of the desk beside the bowl of candy they had prepared under the pretence of preparing for any of their neighbours who chose to celebrate by trick or treating up and down the halls, but had mostly snacked on themselves while binging _Chilling Adventures of Sabrina_ , and headed for the bathrooms.

There was excited chatter coming from the left, where the shower stalls were, a handful of girls gossiping about their costume choices – ranging from Harley Quinn to Carole Baskin, _but, like, a sexy version_ , according to the hastily offered the caveat – and the boys that they hoped would be attending the parties they had been invited to, so Chloe made a right, toward the toilets. A couple of the stall doors were closed, and although she felt a little strange, Chloe ducked her head to check the shoes underneath as she made her way along. 

In the last stall, closest to the far wall, she couldn’t see any feet, but she could hear the sniffles and breathing stuttered with hiccups. Concerned, Chloe knocked gently. 

“It’s me,” she said softly, standing close enough that Myah would be able to identify her boots beneath the stall door. “Are you OK?”

There was a sniffle, and then a wet chuckle from the other side.

“Please tell me you’re wearing tights and, like, the biggest, most Pinterest-worthy cable-knit sweater with those boots?”

Chloe smiled and shook her head at Myah’s typically acidic sarcasm. 

At the other end of the bathroom, one of the closed doors unlatched, and a redhead who Chloe recognised as working the register at the campus book store crossed to the sinks to wash her hands.

“Shut up,” Chloe muttered, but after a moment, offered, “You forgot the chunky scarf and the slouchy pom-pom beanie.”

Myah laughed on the other side of the door, and it sounded damp and sad. 

“Holy fucking shit, Chloe,” Myah said, her voice thick and nasally. “You’re like, basic bitch Barbie.” She paused to blow her nose. “I should have known, no one could live a whole semester with a roommate like Vienna and come out the other side unscathed.”

Chloe chuckled. As the last remaining stall door opened and a girl wearing a bright, sunflower yellow hijab moved to the sinks, pausing to check her reflection in the mirror, the lock on the other side of the door unlatched, and it swung slowly open. Myah sat on the lid of the toilet, still wearing the grunge band tee and boyleg underwear she had slept in, her knees drawn up to her chest. In one hand, she clutched a wad of damp toilet paper, which she dabbed at the end of her nose with, and in the other, she held a forest green football jersey, the front stamped with _Palo Alto_ , curving above a large 74 in white.

“Fuck,” Myah huffed a damp laugh, swiping at her eyes with the back of her hand and shaking her head. She raised her eyebrows, as if impressed, and waved at Chloe with the fistful of makeshift tissues. “It’s the perfect costume for the party tonight. Christian Instagram Influencer, Hashtag - _it’s Fall, y’all_.”

Chloe settled her hands on her hips.

“Are you done?” she asked, playfully, tapping the toe of her boot for good measure. “Because I got pumpkin spiced lattes and they’re getting cold.”

Myah snorted.

“Of course you did,” she said, shaking her head as she climbed from the toilet seat, pausing to tuck the toilet paper into the bowl and flush it away. She watched thoughtfully as the water churned for a moment, then sighed. “That actually sounds really fucking good.”

Chloe’s cheek dimpled with a smile.

“I know, right?”

After Myah rinsed her face at the sink, they walked back to their room together quietly, the jersey still clutched in Myah’s hand. Myah sank onto her bed, folding her legs beneath her, and when Chloe offered her one of the oversized takeout coffee cups, accepted it gratefully, wrapping both hands around it and inhaling the scent of the spiced brew. The jersey lay across her lap, and Chloe couldn’t help glancing at it as she perched on the edge of her own bed.

“You know,” Chloe said, offering a small smile. “You’re welcome to cry in the comfort of your bed next time.” Taking a sip of coffee, she shrugged her shoulders when Myah glanced at her, embarrassed. “No need to hide in the toilets.”

Myah looked down at the jersey in her lap and shook her head.

“I guess I just didn’t want you to see me like this,” she explained quietly, indicating with a wave of her hand her puffy, bloodshot eyes and reddened nose. “I’m not… I don’t like being like this.”

Chloe picked herself up from the edge of her bed to retrieve the bowl of candy from the desk by the door and offered it to the other girl. Myah glanced up at her, cocking a patronising eyebrow, but took two miniature peanut butter Snickers bars from the bowl, all the same. 

“I won’t judge you,” Chloe reassured her as she sat back down on her own bed, selecting a snack-size packet of M&M’s, then chuckled and set the bowl on the blankets beside her. “I mean, you only laughed a little bit when I cried because my curling iron broke.”

Myah smiled ruefully and took a fortifying sip of coffee. 

“A sad day for all,” she murmured, amused, but sobered quickly. “It’s just-“ She cleared her throat, and there was an edge of hurt and frustration in her voice when she continued, tearing at the corner of the chocolate wrapper with short nails painted in chipped black varnish. “Crying over this… it’s useless and too late, and it doesn’t change anything.”

Chloe tipped a couple of M&M’s into her palm.

“Sometimes it just feels better, even if it doesn’t change anything.” She shrugged when Myah glanced at her uncertainly. “That doesn’t make it useless.”

Myah sighed, removing the wrapper from one tiny Snickers bar, and nibbling the chocolate from the corner. As much as Chloe teased her about it, the other girl persisted in her odd method for consuming candy bars, delicately removing the chocolate coating with her teeth before devouring the nougat, nuts, caramel or rice krispies at the centre. 

“I don’t think you’re a basic bitch,” Myah said, her tone soft and apologetic, as she pinched a tiny portion of peanut butter from the centre of the mostly dissected candy bar. 

“I know,” Chloe assured her, the corner of her mouth ticking upwards in a smile. When Myah’s gaze remained lowered, Chloe glanced over her shoulder at the wall above her bed; the photo, the paper dolls, the skateboard hanging, dormant, by its trucks. She looked at the jersey in Myah’s lap and, gently, asked, “Was he someone you knew?”

Myah pressed her lips together, and for a moment, Chloe thought she might not answer. The other girl could be as cagey as she was open, depending on the topic. It had been a full semester before Chloe had even learned that she hailed from Palo Alto, Myah fiercely protective of any information that people might use to pass judgement on her. Her actions and words were who she was, and she refused to be reduced to the assumptions connected with her parents’ zip code. 

With her spare hand and a thoughtful touch, Myah lay the jersey out on her bedsheets. The name stamped over the shoulders _Ruiz-Cortez_. The first half was unfamiliar, the second half was Myah’s surname. Her fingers ghosted over the fabric, lightly tracing the letters.

“Eddie,” Myah said, quietly. “My brother.” She rolled her eyes, mostly at herself, and corrected. “Well, sort of.” She grinned, brightly, despite the tears bright in her eyes. “He was the Patrick to my Sam.”

Chloe drew her knees up beneath her chin and smiled at the reference.

“ _Perks of Being a Wallflower_ ,” she said, and cocked her coffee toward the other girl. “I love it.”

Myah cocked an eyebrow, leaning over to tap the plastic lid of her takeaway coffee cup against Chloe’s in cheers.

“Damn right,” she said, and took a sip, looking down at the jersey. “His mom married my dad when we were five. It was her second or third marriage. She was this super gorgeous Colombian bombshell.” Myah pouted her lips playfully and tossed her head back, as if she were in a shampoo commercial and showing off a mane of luscious hair. “I liked her a lot, she was the fun stepmom, but mostly, after being an only child, I liked having a brother.” 

Chloe thought she could relate. She had been nine by the time Amelia was born. She had spent almost a decade without siblings, as the apple of her mother’s eye and the focus of her attention. But it was lonely – her mother wasn’t interested in climbing trees or catching insects. She partook in the occasional tea party, but once her parents had separated, she also had to work and cook and clean, and that required Chloe to find ways to keep herself occupied while her mother was busy. 

Sometimes she wondered, if she had grown up with a brother or sister, if Monty might have never been part of her life. 

In some ways, it might have been easier. 

But she was glad it wasn’t the case. 

Myah smiled wistfully, and retrieved the second candy bar, picking at the edge of the wrapper. 

“Eddie was like, obsessed with comics. We had boxes and boxes of them in this big treehouse that my dad had built in the backyard, and we’d sneak out there at night with torches to read them.” Myah smiled with childish glee, casting a sidelong look at Chloe. “Our parents got divorced when we were twelve, but he still told people I was his sister, and he kept my dad’s name so we’d have the same. And sometimes, he’d still text me to meet him in the treehouse to read comics.” 

Myah lifted her chin, indicating one of the street art posters on her wall, a blue and black insectoid alien in a defensive fighting pose. Chloe had thought it an odd choice, amongst the social justice themed prints and the paintings by local artists that Myah hung on her side of the room, but she liked the pop of colour, and had never asked the other girl about it. 

“His favourite was the Latino Blue Beetle, Jaime Reyes,” Myah explained, looking up at the costumed character. “Most of the heroes were like, blue-eyed white guys, and then there’s Blue Beetle, who was this brown kid who was still in high school but like, saving people and shit.” She grinned, a bright involuntary flash of joy. “It was pretty dope.”

As Chloe watched, Myah’s smile faded, and she blinked at the poster, her voice quiet and trembling when she spoke again.

“I wish someone like that could have saved Eddie.”

An ache of sorrow deep in her chest drove Chloe from her bed, and she set her coffee aside to climb onto the mattress beside Myah, wrapping her arm around the girl’s quivering shoulders. Myah pressed close, tucking her head beneath Chloe’s chin and burying her face in her thick woollen scarf as tears slid down her cheeks. 

“I couldn’t help him,” Myah said, barely above a whisper and almost muffled by Chloe’s heavy knitted sweater. “So, I try to help other people. But none of it…” She hiccupped, and sat back, looking at Chloe with fiery dark eyes dampened to mournful embers. “I can’t bring him back,” she said, as much to admit the undeniable fact to herself as to explain her sorrow. She sniffled, rubbing away the tears from her cheek with the heel of her hand. “He would have been twenty-one today.”

Chloe wrapped both arms around the other girl, holding her tightly, and bent her head to drop a kiss at her hairline. 

“Some other day,” Chloe said, turning her head to rest her cheek atop Myah’s head. “When you’re feeling up to it, if you want to – I’d love to hear more about him.”

Wrapping her hand around Chloe’s where they were clasped at her shoulder, Myah nodded.

“OK.”

~

**November 2018**

Three days after she had spent the afternoon at the skate park with Justin, watching Amelia try to teach him how to kick-flip her skateboard, bending down to adjust his stance the way Monty once had for her, although her efforts were tinged with a little more impatience and a liberal peppering of frustrated glances that were eventually watered down by Justin’s charming smile and natural humility, Chloe drove past the little green house on her way to an evening shift at the Walplex.

As she passed the Jeep, parked against the curb beneath the tree, she slammed her foot down on the brake pedal, her body jolting hard against her seatbelt with the abrupt stop.

The sun was setting and the slope of the hill cast the house in shadow as the light faded behind its crest, but even in the growing gloom, the aqua blue was unmistakable. 

Chest tight and face hot, Chloe glanced belatedly in the rear-view mirror to check that there were no vehicles behind her, then yanked the steering wheel around, clenching her jaw as the front passenger tire mounted the curb opposite the house. The handbrake groaned in protest as she tugged it into place. Gripping the keys tightly in her fist, she shoved the door open and crossed the street to where the trash had been put out for collection, a few feet from the front bumper of the Jeep. 

Unsurprisingly, the green plastic garbage cart’s lid was propped open, overfilled with empty beer bottles that clearly no one cared enough to separate into recycling. The bottles rattled, raising a brittle cacophony as Chloe pulled the lid clear, half hoping and half dreading what she thought she had seen from the road.

All at once, her heart seemed to leap into her throat and fall into the pit of her stomach, torn raggedly apart as she realised it was exactly what she thought.

Chloe lifted the Liberty Tigers varsity jacket from the top of the pile of trash, sending the empty bottles clattering against one another, the sound loud and sharped-edged in the growing dusk. Tugging a piece of plastic food packaging from the sleeve with one shaking hand and brushing away the smear of red that it left behind, she looked up the slope of the front lawn at the house. The screen and front door were both closed, but the truck was in the car-port, old and dirty and parked at a careless, drunken angle. 

Chloe’s fist tightened in the fabric of the jacket. 

Leaving the lid of the bin hanging open and clattering against the side of the cart in the evening breeze, she stormed up the steep driveway. 

Her heartbeat was thundering so loudly in her ears that she couldn’t even hear herself think, wasn’t even sure that she was thinking _anything_ , the inside of her skull seeming to vibrate with a ceaseless, wounded shriek, and Chloe wasn’t certain what she was going to do until the moment she arrived on the doorstep. Her fingers were trembling as she curled them into a fist and, without hesitating, she pounded on the edge of the screen door. There was a mutter inside, a shuffling of movement, and when the door wasn’t opened immediately afterwards, she knocked again, harder, rattling the metal frame on its hinges. 

“ _What_?”

Big Monty was drunk, which didn’t put much of a dent in his physical capacity, considering blackout was practically his nightly bedtime routine. Other than the stench of alcohol, he stood upright and bleary-eyed, the question slurred irritably as he yanked open the door and frowned at her through the security screen between them.

Chloe glared up at him, her cheeks hot, every inch of skin seeming to burn with the searing, seething anger that roiled inside of her.

“What is wrong with you?”

She thought the words might have ripped through the early evening gloom as a scream, all of the pain and rage that roared in her chest like an injured animal tearing its way out of her so wildly that it might crack her teeth with the force of it, but the question crept from her lips barely above a trembling whisper.

He squinted at her.

“What?”

“What is _wrong_ with you?” she repeated, louder, but no steadier than her first attempt, every fibre of her being, from her fingertips and her jaw to the unsettled thoughts staggering into one another inside her head, shaking beneath the immeasurable weight of her loss and guilt and fury. She could feel her eyes burning, stinging with tears, and she hated herself for it, hated letting him see it. “He hasn’t even been gone a month.”

Big Monty blinked, and his bloodshot eyes dropped to the jacket clutched in her hand.

“The fuck-?”

“No funeral,” Chloe interrupted, the words snapped off like rounds of ammunition. “No service. No headstone.” Her throat tried to seize with grief, all at once forced to confront the reality of it, and she ground out past teeth almost chattering with anger and hurt, “You’ve just left him there, lying in the cold and dark, alone –“ Furious, she brandished the jacket in one fist. “And now this.”

Big Monty raised a lazy eyebrow.

“He ain’t lying anywhere,” he drawled, disinterested and cruel. “He’s dirt in a fucking jar-“ If he noticed the way that she flinched, he showed no reaction to it “-and if it didn’t cost me money to have a say, I’d tell them to save the shelf space and throw that jar in the fucking trash where it belongs.” 

Chloe thought she might throw up. She thought that her knees might collapse, no longer able to bear the weight of everything they had all done wrong, none of them as much as this man.

“If this is what you plan on doing with his things-“ Chloe said, the pain and anger, hot and acidic, simmering over, flowing from her uncontrolled, spewing like ash and embers from an inferno. “-at least let us go through them first.” She wasn’t even sure who that meant, _us_ , but it felt wrong to make a personal claim, when she hadn’t been there for him – not in the end. “You owe it to the people who cared about hi-“

Chloe stumbled back as Big Monty’s hand whipped upwards and shoved open the screen door, removing the barrier between them as it swung wide. He wasn’t a large man, but he had more than a foot of height advantage, and outweighed her almost two-fold. She hadn’t ever seen him hit a woman, but she had seen the brutal, mindless destruction he was capable of, and her gaze flicked downwards, to the scarred, roughened knuckles of his hands. 

He chuckled darkly. 

“You scared, _puta_?” he sneered at her, looking at her own unsteady hands, smirking at the pain that brightened her eyes and trembled in her lips, mistaking her unsteadiness for fear. “Haven’t got your little skateboard today, huh?” His expression darkening, he lifted his chin to indicate the Jeep, parked a few yards away beneath the tree. “I know you been rifling in there. Stealing. I should call the fucking cops.”

Chloe felt a brittle laugh rattle free of her chest. 

“ _You_ should call the cops?”

Incredulity and sarcasm were heavy but stretched thin and threadbare over the guilt in her voice. Chloe could have counted back the days, one by one, to the moment that they met, sitting beneath the tree in her front yard with a little pink plastic tea set between them, and tallied thousands of days, millions of seconds. She could have scratched them out on the walls of her mind, every single one representing a decision she wished she had made differently. Infinite opportunities to have said something, done something, told someone, who this man was and what he did, that she didn’t take. And Chloe regretted every single one. The coldest, darkest, loneliest care placement, the nightmare possibility that had always frightened her out of reporting what she knew and saw and did her best to patch up, would have been better than this, because maybe, he would still be alive. 

The thought choked her, and Chloe swallowed hard. 

Big Monty looked into her brimming eyes, and his lip curled with disgust. 

“Stupid little girl,” he said bitterly, shaking his head. “Leave it the fuck alone. He doesn’t deserve your tears.” His tone was almost pitying, and it made her feel sick as she watched his expression darken and twist. “He was a murderer and a rapist and a fucking faggot.”

Very clearly, grasping a hold of her pain and fury with both hands and holding herself steady, Chloe responded.

“He was what you made him.”

Big Monty narrowed his eyes at her, and took a step backwards, his fist tight on the edge of the door. Past his shoulder, Chloe could see Marisol standing at the hallway entrance, a knitted cardigan pulled on over her work uniform and her arms folded across her stomach. She watched them silently, her face pale beneath the scant dusting of freckles across her nose, and her expression impassive as her husband cleared his throat, glaring at the blonde girl standing on his worn and threadbare doormat. 

“Stay outta my fucking trash.”

Chloe stood in the low dusk light outside the door as the resounding crack of it slamming closed reverberated down the quiet street. Her heartbeat fluttering in her throat and her breath stuttering from her lips, she closed her eyes, and told herself that she wouldn’t cry.

She kept that promise, striding down the steep slope of the front yard to her car, where she carefully folded the jacket and placed it in the front passenger seat. Her throat prickled and her jaw clenched, but she kept it, still, on the drive to the Walplex, where she pulled up beside Diego’s aunt’s pick-up truck, casting a lingering glance at the roaring tiger emblem before she got out of the car. By the time she reached the break room, her hands had stopped trembling, and Chloe took a moment to check her makeup, busying herself with a simple task while her mind churned, searching and parsing reams of possibilities for a solution.

Diego walked into the break room, peeling a pair of plastic gloves from his hands and balled them up, tossing them into the trash bin in the corner before casting a glance at Chloe. She sat at the solitary table in the room, its legs uneven and wobbly and the chairs shoved in beneath it mismatched and uncomfortable. He was uncharacteristically sombre, all of that warmth and charm giving way to the quiet sorrow of loss. 

Chloe didn’t notice. 

With unsteady but deliberate hands, she looked at herself in a small compact mirror, applying powder across her cheekbones. Cautiously, Diego sat down opposite her. He tugged his phone from his pocket but didn’t unlock the screen, casting curious, concerned glances at her behind the shell of her compact. Chloe thought that he wanted to say something, ask something, but was hesitant to interrupt. She continued, her hand moving mechanically, her makeup perfectly adequate, but her mind still working, furious and relentless.

On the wall above the sink, the clock – set a few minutes fast, so that no one had any excuse for returning late from break – ticked. 

When she realised what she had to do, Chloe exhaled slowly, and closed the compact, setting it down on the table in front of her. Diego watched her, seemed to wait for her to say something, and when she didn’t, raised his shoulder in a small shrug. 

“You OK?”

“No,” she said, her eyes on the compact. “But I will be.”

Fidgeting with the edge of his phone case, Diego nodded, looking down at the blank screen.

“OK.” He said. “Good.”

~

**November 2021**

They found Diego at the bottom of the hill, at the edge of the non-denominational section. He had his phone in his hand, but smiled and slid it into the pocket of his trousers when he spotted them. As had become established tradition, over a succession of far too many goodbyes, he wore a Liberty Tigers jersey over his black dress shirt, the front emblazoned with the number 32. He stood beside a woman with hazel eyes and hair the colour of soot pulled into a long tail of loose curls. 

“Hey,” he said quietly, opening his arms to hug Chloe. He was warm and solid as she wrapped her arms around him, the oddly bunched little posy clenched in her hand at the small of his back, and he let her take the lead, holding her until she was ready to let go. When she stepped back so that he could embrace Sheri, lowering his head to rest his chin on her hair, Chloe could still smell the notes of citrus and spice in his cologne. 

“This is my _Tia_ Rosa,” Diego introduced when Sheri stepped back, touching the woman’s shoulder. She was petite and wiry, dressed in black trousers and a sheer black blouse, her arms inked with tattoos from neck to knuckles underneath. “ _Tia_ , this is Chloe, and Sheri.”

“You make me sound so old when you call me that,” Rosa chastised lightly, extending her hand and a warm smile to each of the girls. “Rosa Polanco.”

Rosa had a firm handshake, the same clipped syllables that characterised Diego’s accent, and a great sense of humour when Sheri glanced between her and Diego, a cheeky smile dimpling her cheek.

“I’m guessing you’re the Polanco half of Torres-Polanco Construction?” she asked, and at Rosa’s curiously cocked eyebrow, elaborated, “I owe you a thank you, for footing the bill for my breakfast yesterday.”

Rosa pursed her lips and turned a look toward Diego, who opened his mouth as if to explain, but gave up before he started, simply sighing and raising his shoulders in a shrug. Rosa rolled her eyes.

“This boy,” she said, her tone affectionate as she jerked her thumb over her shoulder in his direction. “He could charm anyone into a thirty-thousand-dollar renovation and then dash every dollar of it hiring his friends and buying coffee for pretty girls.” Chloe and Sheri laughed as Diego shook his head, cheeks growing pink, and Rosa smiled at him lovingly. “Which is why I’m in charge of the money, and he is in charge of knocking out walls and lugging around stone benchtops.”

Chloe chuckled, shifting the jacket slung over her arm back to the crook of her elbow, and asked, “Is Luke planning on coming by?”

Diego, seeming to notice the jacket for the first time, blinked at it, and then up at her.

“He’s gonna try,” he said, and looked like he might elaborate, but his gaze trailed back to the white and aqua blue fabric. “Is that-“ He bit off the question, jaw flexing, and shook his head. “I didn’t know we were allowed to bring anything to put with him.”

Chloe looked down at the jacket and, after handing the posy of flowers to Sheri, took it by the shoulders. It had been a little creased from the months it had spent packed securely in the box of belongings from her bedroom. After she had tended to her own clothes with the steamer that her mother brought upstairs and showed her how to operate – practiced after decades of using the same model to deal with kinks and folds in curtains, bedspreads and upholstery before showing homes to prospective buyers and renters – Chloe had carefully worked out the lines. It had long since lost the scents she remembered, tiger balm and hot peppers, something sweet like guava at the back of the collar from the wax he used to style his hair and a hint of lime from his cologne, but she tended to it gently, until it looked as if it had just been shrugged off, and he might be back to collect it, soon.

Chloe cleared her throat.

“It’s not for him,” she clarified, looking up at Diego. “I thought maybe you might like it.”

Diego hesitated, biting his lower lip, but when Chloe offered him the jacket, he reached to take in his work-roughened hands. The pad of his thumb skipped over the small tear at the seam of the left shoulder, the result of a fight or mischief or both, and his fingers tightened in the fabric as he swallowed hard, his brown eyes bright when they flicked to her.

“Thank you,” he said, quiet and unsteady, and Rosa smiled gently, stepping closer to place a hand on his shoulder. She looked at the girls.

“You all went to school together?” she asked, her tone politely curious. “All of you were friends?”

Chloe glanced at Sheri, and the other girl nodded.

“Yes,” she said, with a sombre smile. “We were friends.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to [ closetfascination ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetfascination/pseuds/closetfascination) for the beta reading and chats! If you're not already, I encourage you to check out her fics!
> 
> This should be the last of the *sadder* chapters for a little while. Next up is the next set of mini-scenes, and then we'll be shuffling back to 2017 for Sheri's next chapter, to a time when no one was gone and these kids, for the most part, could just be kids. 
> 
> Thank you for reading and commenting!


	8. Interval

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another set of mini-scenes! This time we have:
> 
> \- Justin and Sheri, chatting about Sheri's parents divorce, as mentioned in Dizzy  
> \- Chloe and Monty, *hair-braiding*, also from Dizzy  
> \- Sheri and Monty, the morning after the game of truth or date in Rodeo

The afternoon sun curved high and bright, burnishing the sky to a saturated shade of blue. Music filled the air, bass-heavy pop floating in the humid atmosphere, mingling with the burble of the hot tub and the rise and fall of chatter. The smell of cooking smoke and marinated meats wafted from beneath the patio, where Bryce manned the barbeque, laughing and chatting with a handful of boys from the baseball team. 

The paving stones were rough and searing hot underfoot, and Justin leap-frogged between patches of water and shade, detouring into the garden bed to nudge the inflatable volleyball from beneath the fronds of a low fern when a wayward serve sent it careening, and kicked it back into the pool. Monty and Diego both dove for it, the former making the catch only to be dragged beneath the surface by the latter as they wrestled for the ball, Zach and Alex casting one another bemused glances on the other side of the net while they waited for the victor to emerge from the churning water.

Sheri had her back to him, but she glanced up, startled, at the hiss Justin drew between his teeth as he made a desperate, tip-toed dash across the last couple of yards to the safety of the shade beneath the umbrella, where she sat on the end of one of the poolside lounges.

“Oh, thanks,” she said quietly and with a small smile, reaching up to accept the can of soda that he offered. “You’re sweet.”

She locked her phone, which had been the focus of her attention as he approached, and slid it beneath her towel. In the pool, Monty and Diego finally broke the surface of the water, each of them with one arm wrapped around the ball and the other shoving at their opponent, Monty’s hand crushed against the side of Diego’s face and Diego’s hand jammed at the base of Monty’s throat as they sputtered, choked and laughed. Balancing two hotdogs in one hand, an open beer bottle pinned to his side with one elbow, and a bowl of Cheetos in the crook of his opposite arm, Justin flopped gratefully onto the lounge beside Sheri, and began relieving himself of his load.

“I thought you looked hungry,” he explained, sheepishly, as Sheri watched with one eyebrow raised, accepting one of the hotdogs when he offered it. She plucked a strip of charred red bell pepper from the top and popped it into her mouth.

“I am, actually,” she said, then hesitated before adding, eyes downcast, “It’s kinda lonely, eating by myself at home, so sometimes I just… don’t.”

Justin, jaws full of hotdog, swiped the tomato ketchup from the corner of his mouth and choked down the half-chewed food.

“Yeah,” he said, quietly. “I get that.”

Sheri glanced sidelong at him, lips parted, and shook her head.

“Sorry, Justin,” she said. “I didn’t mean… my parents, their divorce, it’s nothing like what you went through growing up, with only your mom to-“

“No,” Justin interrupted, gently, before she could spiral any further. “It’s not the same,” he agreed, with a shrug. “But it still fucking sucks.”

Sheri smiled sadly and picked at her hotdog bun.

“Yeah,” she said. “It fucking sucks.”

In the pool, Zach opened his mouth to referee the wrestling match, right in time to catch a mouthful of water as Scott ran from beneath the patio and threw himself into a rowdy cannonball at the two boys, all five of them disappearing in a white wash that sprayed the entire area with water. 

Sheri brushed the chlorinated droplets from her hotdog, smiling ruefully as the boys emerged, soaked and coughing, and Alex snatched the ball as it bobbed to the surface before any more fights could break out.

“Does it still look like your ma’s gonna move out?” Justin asked, reaching into the bowl of Cheetos and crumbling a handful over the top of his hotdog. Already loaded with onions, peppers, ketchup and mustard, the creation was truly something only Justin would have eaten. 

Sheri nodded and popped a Cheeto in her mouth.

“Looks like it,” she said, reaching for another Cheeto. “I feel terrible for thinking it, but it will almost be a relief.” She paused to chew and cast a glance at Justin’s hotdog as he took a large bite. “It’s like the Gaza strip at the moment. If one of them accidentally walks into a room the other one is in, they just erupt. Figuring out who gets to use the kitchen or eat meals together is like a hostage negotiation.” Sheri sighed. “I kind of wish she would just go.”

As the game got back underway in the pool, Luke joining Zach and Alex’s team to even out the numbers – although Diego protested the obvious height advantage on the opposite side of the net – Sheri took a couple of Cheetos and, following Justin’s example, crumbled them over her hotdog. 

“Right?” Justin grinned, nodding at her hotdog as she took an experimental bite. “The trick is to eat it quick, before the Cheetos get soggy.”

Sheri giggled, shaking her head. Justin smiled, taking another big bite. 

“Mom says she wants me to go with her,” Sheri said quietly, wiping the pad of her thumb over the corner of her mouth. Justin raised his eyebrows. 

“What do you want to do?”

Sheri shook her head, raising her shoulders in a helpless, conflicted shrug. 

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I feel like she only wants me to go because it would be a win over Dad, and Dad says he’ll support whatever decision I make, which I know is what I should want, but I can’t help feeling like he just doesn’t want me to know he’ll be heartbroken if I don’t pick him.” Sheri looked up at him, eyes rounded with sorrow. “What would you do?”

The volleyball flew from the pool as Luke cut across Scott’s serve, and Bryce cursed as it bounced across the barbecue’s hot plate. 

Justin smiled reassuringly. 

“I don’t know,” he answered, honestly. “But I don’t think you should do what you hope will make them happy. Because no matter what, everyone’s still gonna be sort of sad.” He lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “And if it doesn’t work out, we can go and like, live in a treehouse, or something.” He popped the last bite of his hotdog into his mouth and tongued it into his cheek to speak around it. “With a sign on the ladder that says _No Parents Allowed_.”

Reaching over to brush a Cheeto crumb from Justin’s cheek, Sheri smiled. 

~

As much as he told himself that he didn’t care, Monty knew that wasn’t true.

He wasn’t a passionate football fan. He didn’t support any state or college teams, he hadn’t grown up watching games with his family, the super bowl was just one of those days when it was easier to take advantage of the excitement and distraction to slip things from the shelves into his pockets and avoid getting carded by Wally at the Blue Spot, before he rode his board down to the skatepark to meet Chloe. And now, being selected for the junior varsity team in freshman year was just a means to an end. A failsafe, because his grades had never been anything to brag about, and he had to get out of this piece of shit town somehow. It was something to do, something to keep him out of trouble, a way to siphon off some of that destructive energy that was always brimming just beneath that surface that wouldn’t land him in detention or the sheriff’s station. Monty could give a fuck if they won or lost, as long as he got to bash some heads along the way. 

Football was just football. Monty neither loved nor hated it. It just _was_. 

And he shouldn’t feel this nervous when he didn’t give a shit.

Monty tried to ignore the tiny, unsteady tremor in his knees as he trotted along the tunnel that ran beneath the bleachers from the changerooms, his helmet tucked against his side, one hand tugging a support band up his arm to his elbow. 

“Where’s your sleeve?” Kerba had wanted to know, looking down at Monty where he was sitting on the bench as the teams set up the first play. 

It was their first game as a team and Bryce was in his element out on the field, calling instructions and encouragement to the other boys, all brash charm and natural bravado. The opposition team were less disciplined, their command less centralised and absolute, their linesmen bumping into one another as they attempted to find their starting positions. 

“It’s fine,” Monty shrugged, waving off the question. “I don’t need it.”

The truth was, he would prefer to wear it. After working weekends with his father, hauling barrowloads of bricks and tiles from demolished walls, the support made a lot of difference, but Bryce elbowed him in the ribs back in the changerooms and asked if he had gotten a repetitive strain injury from jacking off his boyfriend, and the boys around them had found it hilarious. 

Monty had stuffed it back into his locker and jogged out onto the field without it. 

Kerba raised his eyebrows at him.

“You need it if I say you need it,” he said, his tone pre-emptively warning against argument. “We’re running the Fake Reverse next play, and if you don’t make that pass, you’ll regret not putting on your sleeve when I asked you-“ He pinned Monty with a direct stare, which suggested he was alluding to more than just personal disappointment in himself, and clarified, “-because I’ll box your damn ears. Now, go.”

Monty had never given a shit about football, and he’d never given a shit about disappointing anybody, or making anyone proud and he didn’t _want_ to, but-

“There you are!”

Monty looked up, startled, to find Chloe rushing toward him from the other end of the tunnel. Her cheer uniform was bright aqua blue, and her makeup precisely applied, long dark lashes framing her worried expression as she reached him.

“I need your help.”

Monty’s eyes searched her face wildly and swept down over her body to her sneakers, a frantic physical assessment. He couldn’t see a scratch on her.

“What’s wrong?”

Chloe turned, pointing at the back of her head, where her hair had been caught by something and torn her braid. She stood there, waiting, and Monty blinked, lips parted, then shook his head, huffing a breath through his nose. 

“ _Shit_ ,” he muttered. “There’s no one on the squad who knows how to fucking braid?”

“I’m going to miss the first routine,” Chloe urged him, avoiding the question, and Monty suspected he knew the answer. He had been braiding Chloe’s hair since she had taught him when they were seven, in exchange for helping him with his spelling homework. Once he had gotten the hang of it, she rarely let her mother braid it anymore, claiming that she was too careful of hurting her to secure it tightly enough. Monty had thought that was a bad thing at the time, and now, he decided he had probably been right. 

Monty looked up and down the tunnel, then shoved his helmet into her hands. His gloves came off next, the velcro straps torn open and each one tugged off with his teeth before he dumped them inside the upturned helmet, and gestured for her to turn around. His fingers worked briskly, tugging the elastic tie from the end and slipping the strands of the ruined braid loose. As always, Chloe forgave him the odd stinging tug as he wove each section tight, as if in reprimand for coming loose in the first instance. 

Monty didn’t see Luke until he was already almost on top of them, and his hands stilled in Chloe’s hair as the taller boy lumbered up to them. 

“Forgot my helmet,” Luke said as he passed with a bashful grin, and continued on his way to the locker rooms. Monty took a slow breath, and after a moment his fingers began moving again, looping strands into a neat fishtail pattern as he muttered, mostly to himself.

“Of course he fucking did.”

Looking down at his helmet in her hands, Chloe smiled. 

~

“Hey,” Sheri said, when she spotted him sitting on a crate in the alley alongside the Blue Spot Liquor Store, the day after they played truth or dare on the pier. “Feeling a little rough this morning?”

Monty looked up at her from the shade beneath the brim of his baseball cap and shrugged.

“Been worse,” he said, and when he tipped the bottle in his hand, wrapped in a crumpled brown paper bag, to his lips, it was difficult to tell if the shadows beneath his eyes were the result of a restless night of tequila-soaked dreaming or simply the water-stain residue of lingering bruises behind the lenses of his glasses. “You?”

Sheri stepped into the narrow strip of shade at the edge of the building and leaned back against the bricks, the wall radiating a bracing warmth that seeped into her skin.

“Scott had another blunt hidden in his sock, so we smoked it without y’all on the way home,” she said, a hint of teasing playing in her tone when he turned a look in her direction, eyebrows raised with mild betrayal. Sheri smiled, tearing open the large packet of salt and vinegar flavoured chips she had bought from Wally inside. “Such a smooth blend, but I swear I always wake up starving.”

Monty grunted, and when she offered him the packet, took a handful.

Sheri cocked an eyebrow, lifting her chin.

“You got a little…“ She tapped her own lower lip, and Monty swiped at his mouth, carelessly and automatically, with the back of his hand, casting her a curious glance when she giggled. “No, I meant, it’s a little bruised.” She grinned as Monty’s cheeks flushed pink beneath his freckles. “Justin gave you one hell of a kiss last night.”

“Shut up,” Monty muttered, and shoved most of the handful of chips in his mouth, all at once. 

Sheri smiled playfully, chewing on a chip.

“Really, though. I bet you two could take out homecoming kings,” she said, and when Monty wrinkled his nose, insisted, “The only thing girls like more than a cute boy is two cute boys dating.”

Monty coughed, as if there were crumbs caught in his throat, then took a swig from the bottle of what smelled like hard cider when he belched unapologetically a moment later.

“Well, that wouldn’t even be fair,” he countered and took another long draw from the bottle. “You know Diego’s campaigning to knock Bryce off the throne.”

Sheri did know that. It was the latest in a loosely knotted string of attempts to get under Bryce’s skin and otherwise prove to the other boy that he was not as untouchable as he thought he was. She wasn’t sure why Diego bothered. Bryce was just as convinced of his absolute power as the people who gave it to him were. 

“As noble an objective as that may be,” she said, with a dash of bitter sarcasm, “I think even Diego knows that the only way he’s getting that crown is by going as Bryce’s date.”

Monty huffed a chuckle and shook his head.

“Wouldn’t work,” he muttered. “Bryce always buys corsages with wisteria and Diego’s allergic.” He lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “Plus, purple’s not really his colour.”

Monty said it with all of the flat and sarcastic disinterest of someone who couldn’t have brought themselves to care about social politics even with a gun to their head, but it was just a little too much detail, even offered casually and as a joke, and Sheri thought she heard something sharp-edged underneath, crushed down, but not quite far enough to totally hide, as he reached up for another handful of her chips. 

“Well, maybe you could help him win, then,” she suggested lightly, shrugging her shoulders as he rummaged in the packet of chips. “You know, if you wanted to go with him.”

Monty turned his head, squinting up at her from behind his glasses. 

“You sure it was last night when you smoked that blunt?” he asked, incredulous. “It wasn’t just now?”

Sheri laughed, and although she noted that Monty didn’t object to the idea of going to the homecoming dance with Diego – not _exactly_ – she didn’t point that out.

“If he can’t wear wisteria,” she asked, the edge of her mouth tugging up in a curious smile, “what corsage _would_ you get him?”

Monty snorted.

“Fuck off,” he said, and handed her the bottle of cider. “He can buy _me_ the fucking corsage.” He grinned at Sheri’s giggle, and wagged a roguish eyebrow beneath the brim of his baseball cap, eyes shadowed with bruising but bright with glee. “And if you must know, it would be wild rose and apple blossom.”

Tipping the bottle of cider to her lips, Sheri smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much to [ closetfascination ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetfascination/pseuds/closetfascination) for the beta reading and chats. If you're not already reading them, I encourage you to check out her fics - I'm so excited for you to see what she's been working on!
> 
> Although he wouldn't know it, I actually looked up the language of flowers for Monty's choice of corsage. Wild rose means 'pleasure and pain' and apple blossom means 'you above all others', which seemed fitting for a hypothetical, imaginary corsage exchanged between him and Diego. 
> 
> Next up we're back to Sheri, and we're heading allllll the way back to 2017, where nobody is dead (yay!) and featuring appearances from a bunch of characters I've never written before. I'm looking forward to hearing what you think.
> 
> As always, thank you so much for reading and commenting x


	9. Sheri

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Returning to school for junior year after summer, our little gang of four are assigned a group project with a discussion topic none of them are keen to share.

**August 2017**

The morning before they started the group project, Sheri broke a plate.

She told herself that she hadn’t meant to – not really. There was no intent; no conscious thought to destroy it had entered her mind. Rather, it had been a sudden flash of searing anger, so fierce that it singed the edges of her sadness to ash. At that moment, there was nothing else but that aching fury, whipping up the urge to lash out at something, _anything_ , and before she realised what she was doing, she had thrown her plate, toast and all, into the bottom of the kitchen sink so hard that it shattered.

Her father rushed down the stairs, half-dressed, his belt hanging loose and only one foot adorned with a sock, and had peered into the kitchen to ask if she was OK. 

“Fine,” Sheri muttered, bewildered in the aftershock of her own fury. She shook her head when he lingered there, watching her, and offered a smile. “I’m fine. I just dropped it.”

Her phone lay on the kitchen table where she had been sitting. As she spoke, it timed out, and the screen went dark. 

Casting her an uncertain glance, her father nodded slowly, and told her to be careful she didn’t cut herself cleaning it up as he headed back upstairs to finish getting ready for work. 

Sheri stood looking down at the mess in the bottom of the sink, her hands trembling. 

This wasn’t her. 

Sheri wasn’t like this. She was sweet and kind. She was friendly and helpful and funny. She was the peacekeeper, the solution finder, the mediator who could deescalate situations with a soft touch and a gentle word. 

She didn’t destroy things in a fit of rage. 

Her throat felt tight and Sheri swallowed hard against the prickle of tears, when she felt a nudge against her fingers. Peach looked up at her with huge dark eyes, eyebrows twitching with concern, her cheeks running with drool from the anticipation of the peanut butter toast Sheri would have normally shared with her. 

“Sorry, girl,” Sheri murmured, scratching the large dog behind the ears. “No toast today.”

Sheri folded her anger down neatly and set it aside, retrieved a tissue to blow her nose, then got on with tidying up.

After she had cleaned up the broken plate, bagging the ceramic shards with the untouched toast and tossing it in the trash, she plucked a dried fish treat from the plastic container on the top shelf of the pantry, and Peach sat obediently, her tail sweeping back and forth across the kitchen tiles with excitement. While Peach enjoyed her replacement breakfast, settling the snack between her huge paws to gnaw at it, Sheri glanced at her mobile phone, abandoned on the kitchen table. 

Maybe she _had_ meant to break that plate.

It was a better option than breaking her phone. 

“You want a ride in to school?” 

Her father reappeared in the kitchen, still buckling his belt, grabbed a can of energy drink from the refrigerator, and then turned to retrieve his lunch bag, sitting neatly on the countertop next to Sheri’s.

“You know that’s not breakfast, right?” Sheri asked, eyeing the can as he leaned down to receive a wet, fish-scented kiss goodbye from Peach. He grinned at her, the bridge of his nose wrinkling at the smell of the dog’s breath.

“You should try it, seeing as you tossed your breakfast in the sink,” he suggested with a rueful wink. “Now, are you coming, or not?”

Sheri dropped a kiss on the top of Peach’s broad head, plucked up her lunch bag, backpack, and her phone, and followed him out the back door. 

When she was younger, Sheri had hated when her father would drive her in to school, his truck emblazoned with the name of the company he worked for. The other kids had seen ‘security’ in the logo and figured that he was involved in some kind of law enforcement, which instantly branded her a narc. As was the way with most rumours, it had been a difficult label to shake. She had still joined clubs and the cheerleading squad, and made friends easily enough, but the other kids didn’t trust her, making jokes about Sheri calling her dad if she showed up to a party where people were drinking or smoking weed. It wasn’t until she had accepted a week of after-school detention rather than reveal who had given her a copy of the answers to Mrs Baxter’s history exam ahead of time that she fully shrugged off those assumptions. 

These days, running his own home and commercial security consultation business, her father had more work through referrals than he could keep up with most weeks, and no longer needed to advertise. Sheri preferred the black late-model SUV most days, but today, sitting in the passenger seat as they drove toward Liberty, all she could think about was the fight her mother had started when he brought it home from the dealership.

Her father pulled the SUV smoothly to the curb outside of the main entrance, and leaned forward to retrieve his half-finished can of energy drink, taking another long gulp. When he saw Sheri eyeing him, he raised his eyebrows, and offered the can.

“Sure you don’t want some?”

Sheri chuckled, shaking her head.

“That stuff is a heart attack in a can,” she chastised lightly, and poked a finger at his lunch bag on the dashboard. “I packed you sardines, brown rice and grilled vegetables for lunch. Please promise you’ll eat it and give your body at least one proper meal today?”

He grinned at her over the rim of the can of energy drink.

“Sounds delicious,” he said, and there was just a touch of sarcasm in the words, but the laughter lines at the edges of his eyes crinkled as he returned the can to the drink holder and reached to cradle her head in one hand, dropping a kiss atop her hair. “What would I do without you to look after me?” he asked rhetorically, voice full of affection as he sat back and looked at her. “Have a good day, baby-girl.”

Sheri nodded, unbuckling her seatbelt. 

“You, too,” she said as she climbed from the car and turned to pull her backpack from the footwell. “And I’ll be checking your lunch bag when you get home.”

Her father rolled his eyes but smiled.

“Aye aye, captain.”

The morning was uneventful, although Sheri found herself distracted, hurrying back to her locker after PE to check her phone, and leaning past her desk in English to reach into her bag and check it again. By lunch, any lingering anger had mostly boiled down to a deep, aching disappointment. She nudged the rice and vegetables around in her lunchbox and was dimly aware of the conversation amongst the other girls at the table, giggling about Coach Patrick handing out lunch-time detentions last period and making a game of figuring out who had received one based on their absence from the cafeteria. 

“Diego’s there, but no Monty, so he’s definitely in detention.”

“No Zach.”

“Or Justin.”

“And Alex is missing.”

“Wait. Who?”

“You know, blonde hair, nose ring, dresses kinda hot-“

“Ew!”

“Are you sure you think he’s hot? You don’t just think he’s an easy stepping stone to Bryce?”

“Can’t it be both?”

“Come on, ladies. We all know there are no stepping stones required where Bryce is concerned. All you have to do is put out on the first date.”

Sheri frowned at the topic of conversation, raising her head as the girls at the other end of the table dissolved into giggles and loud whispering, and realised that Chloe, sitting opposite, was watching her, blue eyes dark with concern. The other girl glanced down at Sheri’s phone, laying on the table beside her mostly untouched lunch, and Sheri realised that her own preoccupation with it had not been as subtle as she had thought. The inappropriate gossip beside them momentarily forgotten, Sheri’s gaze dropped to her phone, and after a moment, she shook her head. 

“My Mom blocked my number.”

Chloe bit her lip, glancing at the phone, and Sheri’s uneaten lunch, then back to the other girl’s face. 

“Are you sure?” she asked gently, her tone cautiously hopeful. 

Sheri sighed and nodded, setting her fork down beside an untouched protein bar. There was no point in pretending. She couldn’t have eaten a bite if she tried. 

“I’m sure,” she said, her voice sounding tight to her own ears as she battled to press down the hurt that attempted to leak into the words. “It’s her birthday today. I tried to call her to see if we could go for dinner or something…” She trailed off, biting her lip as she recalled sitting at the kitchen table, confused for a moment, before realisation had set in. “It rang once, and went straight to voicemail. So, I texted her, and it’s just sitting on sent.”

Chloe set her own fork down, her salad half-eaten.

“I’m sorry,” she said, soft and sincere. At the other end of the table, the girls continued to exchange rumours that they had heard about Bryce, ranging from Emma Wilson freaking out when he slid a hand beneath her bra when they were making out in his Range Rover after a date, to Katie Carter earning her position as best BJ on the infamous hot or not list by giving Bryce an underwater blowjob in the Walker’s hot tub after one of his parties. Chloe’s expression tightened a little, and she offered a gentle smile. “That really sucks.”

Sheri glanced at the other girls, who giggled amongst themselves, and then over Chloe’s shoulder, to the table where the boys from the football and baseball teams were sitting, a cluster of aqua blue varsity jackets, spit-balls and crude jokes. Diego and Luke sat at one end of the table, making notes in what looked like a playbook, while Bryce commanded the attention of most of the boys in the group, a bright and charming smile lighting his face as he told a joke that sent them all into peals of laughter. 

Quietly, Chloe busied herself fixing the lid back into place on her small bento box and tucking it into her bag. Bryce had been courting her for months, the longest Sheri had ever known him to pursue anyone without gaining anything for his efforts, sending flowers and writing notes, dropping by her locker to invite her to parties and smiling that lopsided, boy next door smile as he wondered aloud what it would take to get her to agree to be his date to the homecoming dance. 

Beside them, the girls whispered loudly about the rumour that Ashley Jones had let Bryce get to third base in the limousine at the Winter Formal last year. 

Sheri looked at Chloe, who pressed her lips into a thin line as she zipped her backpack, and placed the lid back on her own lunchbox. 

“You wanna head to class?” she suggested, smiling warmly. “I haven’t checked my note bag yet this week, and after the morning I’ve had, I could use a pick me up.”

Chloe’s smile was small but grateful, and she nodded her agreement. 

The next period wasn’t due to start for a few minutes, but there were a couple of students in the Communications classroom when they arrived. A pair of girls stood by the window, sharing a set of ear-pods and watching a video on a mobile phone. Courtney Crimson milled around the racks of note bags, her tongue at the corner of her mouth, frowning with concentration as she dropped things inside. Monty was sitting at one of the pods, his backpack at his feet, carefully forging a parent’s signature on a detention slip. Sheri and Chloe crossed to the racks on the far side of the room, swivelling them to locate their individual paper sacks. 

Sheri crouched down to reach into her note bag and scooped out the items inside. There were two slips of paper – one a list of support resources that Mrs Bradley popped into each of their bags each week, this week’s theme family support networks and agencies, the other a folded sheet torn from an exercise book – a snack-size KitKat bar, and button. Sheri realised, when she glanced around the rack at Chloe, who had also retrieved the items from her paper sack, that Courtney had placed one in every note bag. The little circular button was blossom pink, and printed with her campaign phrase – _CC 4 student council_ – and outlined with a Hello Kitty silhouette, Courtney’s signature brand of politics and bubble-gum kitsch. 

“What’s your platform?” Pratters wanted to know, eyeing the button that he pulled from his otherwise empty note bag, taking particular note of the cat motif. “Pussy for all?” He leered at Courtney, who glared up at him from where she was crouched nearby, dropping pins into the last couple of bags. “Or just for you?”

Monty raised his head, the bridge of his nose wrinkled with a frown. Sheri opened her mouth to object, but Luke spoke loudly from where he had just dumped his huge frame into a pod at the front of the room.

“Unlike you,“ he interjected, “most of us don’t need help.” He raised an eyebrow, looking over his broad shoulder at Pratters. “You should be grateful for any cast-offs Courtney sends your way. ‘bout all the action you’re likely to see.”

Pratters opened his mouth to protest, but bit back whatever retort he had planned when Mrs Bradley walked into the room. 

“I need you all to sit two boys and two girls to a pod today, please,” Mrs Bradley called as she set her things down on her desk. She repeated the instruction every time another student arrived. “Two boys, two girls in each pod, please.” She paused, rolling her eyes behind her wire framed glasses. “Mr Pratters, I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain the difference between girls and boys. Please find another pod.”

Chloe followed Sheri to a pod on the far side of the room, slipping her backpack from her shoulder and tucking it beneath a desk. The only occupant of the pod was Monty, and he seemed determined to keep it that way, at least when it came to Pratters, who hesitated and turned away from the dark glare Monty shot in his direction when he began to move toward them. Sheri wasn’t certain why Mrs Bradley was insisting on particular seating arrangements – normally, she was one of the more laid-back teachers at Liberty and content to allow them to choose their own desks – but she was grateful not to have to sit any closer to Pratters than absolutely necessary. 

As they sat, Sheri watched Chloe reach down to her backpack. In her hand, Chloe had the resource list from Mrs Bradley and a small envelope with her name written on the front in Bryce’s handwriting, both of which she stuffed inside her bag. Chloe retrieved her notebook and set it on the desk, but remained bent over her bag, dutifully pinning Courtney’s campaign pin to one of the straps. Sheri knew that there was no love lost between Courtney and Chloe – they often competed for the top test score or highest overall grade average – but she figured it was a gesture intended more as a _fuck you_ to Pratters than a token of support for Courtney, and she leaned over to do the same. 

Students continued to file into the room, hesitating each time Mrs Bradley repeated the instruction to sit two girls and two boys to a pod. Button secured to her bag strap, Sheri tucked the resource list into the front pocket of her bag, and unfolded the second note.

_I know you’re sweet enough, but just in case you’re having a bad day, hopefully this makes it better  
-D_

Cheek dimpling with a smile, Sheri tucked the note and the KitKat into her bag, and didn’t reach to check her phone. 

“Hey, Monty,” Sheri smiled as she pulled her books from her backpack. “I heard Coach Patrick gave you detention over lunch period.”

Monty scoffed, shrugging.

“Yeah,” he muttered, shaking his head. “I guess he’s the only one allowed to sleep through class.”

Sheri’s cheek dimpled as she palmed something small hidden beneath her notebook, cutting a wary glance toward Mrs Bradley, who was preoccupied pointing to a half-empty pod at the front of the classroom while Pratters complained loudly about enforced seating allocations. Surreptitiously, Sheri slid her cupped hand across the surface of the desks to Monty. He leaned forward, placing his larger hand over hers. A black and purple bruise, mottled like a water-stain, coloured the back of his hand, spreading from his knuckles beneath the cuff of his varsity jacket. He expertly slipped the item beneath the open cover of his notebook as Sheri sat back in her chair, casually browsing her pencil case for a pen. Chloe watched as Monty lifted the cover of his notebook just far enough to identify the cherry flavoured protein bar, his gaze flicking to the other girl as a frown creased the bridge of his nose. 

“This is your favourite, though?”

Sheri smiled at him, cocking an eyebrow.

“I know. So, make sure you appreciate the sacrifice.”

The corner of his mouth tugging upward with amusement, Monty slipped the protein bar from beneath the notebook, off the edge of the desk, and into the pocket of his varsity jacket, glancing toward the doorway as Mrs Bradley addressed the last two students to wander in. 

“Two boys and two girls to each pod, please, gentlemen,” she instructed, needlessly. 

There were only two seats left.

Zach and Justin considered their options and, without even a hint of polite reservation, both dove at the last remaining desk in their pod. Justin used his smaller, quicker frame to his advantage, ducking underneath Zach’s superior reach and landing a hand on the back of the empty chair a moment before the other boy. Grinning, Justin offered a cheeky salute and slid into his seat as, defeated, Zach huffed a breath and stepped away to take the empty desk at a pod occupied by Courtney Crimson, Clay Jensen, and Skye Miller. 

“Following on from our discussions about memory, storytelling and perspective, the subject of your next assignment will be the story of your family,” Mrs Bradley explained, retrieving a stack of papers from her desk and beginning to hand them out to each student. “This is a group project, and you’ll be working with the people you’re sitting with.”

A low, collective grumble of protest rose, as students looked around with thinly veiled discontent at the people they were seated with, peered across the room longingly at their friends, and complained. 

“Why can’t we choose our own groups?” Pratters wanted to know, eyeing the students he shared a pod with disinterestedly, apparently unconcerned about protecting anyone’s feelings. “Like, people we actually want to work with?”

Luke, who was unfortunate enough to have taken his usual seat at the front of the classroom because he never remembered to put his contact lenses back in after football practice and couldn’t see the whiteboard without them, frowned at his uncooperative group member. 

“Man, you think anyone else wants to hear the story of your poor mother and how she’s stuck dealing with your shit?”

“OK, guys,” Mrs Bradley called over the top of the chuckling and muttered complaints. “I deliberately split you up this way because I want you all to have the opportunity to learn something about another student you might not normally work with, or know very well.”

Chloe accepted the worksheet that Mrs Bradley offered as she circled their pod, explaining the assignment while she moved around the pod.

“Now, I want you to be creative with how you interpret the requirements of the assignment,” she encouraged, handing Sheri a worksheet, and then Justin, and Monty. “I really want you all to think about how you can apply the concepts we’ve been discussing in an interesting and challenging way.”

Sheri watched Mrs Bradley turn to hand worksheets to another group, in time to miss the glance that Jamie Garrison aimed at her ankles from the next pod over. He noticed Sheri watching him, and when she cocked an eyebrow, just grinned, shrugging his shoulders a little sheepishly. 

Turning back, Sheri skimmed the assignment sheet, briefly making note of the submission parameters - _Think differently! Be creative! Discuss and agree as a group on the most appropriate format_ , and the minimum requirements - _Must address concepts of story-telling, memory, and perspective. No less than two-thousand words per group_ , but her attention lingered on the assignment detail - _each student will share their family story with their group to be presented in a final assignment submission_.

The story of her family?

She was supposed to share the details of the mother who weaponised her affection and acceptance by withdrawing it as punishment? The father who would subsist on whatever he could purchase at a gas station and work twenty-hour days if she didn’t intervene? Honestly, the most normal member of her family was Peach, and with her pedigree, Sheri could trace her lineage back several generations.

But she had a feeling Mrs Bradley, as kind and understanding as she was, would not accept a paper about a dog. 

And anyway, that was only _her_ family.

Sheri glanced across the desk at Monty, who seemed to feel her attention on him, his eyes flicking upwards to meet her gaze over the top of the assignment sheet in his hand before cutting away, his jaw clenched tight. Justin chewed the end of his pen anxiously, his brow furrowed as he read through the project’s listed requirements. Outwardly, Chloe seemed calm, but her grip on the assignment sheet was pinched tight enough to wrinkle the edges of the page. 

“You have four weeks to work on your submission,” Mrs Bradley continued to explain as she finished circling the classroom and returned to stand beside her desk. “We’ll be continuing discussions in class of our next topics – sympathy, empathy and compassion – so this will be something for you to work on out of class, although you are always welcome to discuss any questions or ideas with me at any time.”

A groan went up, and predictably, Pratters’ voice cut through the collective expression of disappointment.

“But Miss,” he whined, and Sheri barely refrained from rolling her eyes. “We just got back from summer break. You can’t like,“ He gestured vaguely, while Luke cast him a sharp sideways look, “ease us into it, or something?”

Mrs Bradley shrugged her shoulders good-naturedly and smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners behind her spectacles. 

“You should all be refreshed and ready to catch up with each other, then,” she countered brightly. “And what better way to do that than telling each other your family stories?”

Far from settling the class, a new wave of protests rose, and Mrs Bradley gestured for them to quieten down so that she could continue. 

“This group collaboration project is worth one-fifth of your semester grade total so please make sure you don’t leave it to the last minute.” Her voice rose in an upward scale to be heard as the grumbling increased in volume once more. “Don’t leave one person to do all the work, make sure you take the time to think creatively and compassionately, listen to each other, compromise, and be thoughtful in how you present your final submission.”

As hands began to rise around the room, students protesting their group allocations and asking various questions, from what counted as _family_ to whether they might be excused on the basis that they believed the assignment to be a thinly veiled attempt by the illuminati to steal their identity, Sheri bit the inside of her lip, and turned back to the assignment sheet. Mrs Bradley was encouraging them to think creatively about the assignment’s principles and to present something imaginative that met the requirements, but it would take a hell of a lot of imagination to avoid the topic that not one person sitting at their pod wanted to share. 

As she moved across the classroom to respond to another question, having addressed the concerns of the conspiracy theorist amongst them as best she could manage, Mrs Bradley addressed the class again. 

“If your group doesn’t have any questions, you’re welcome to go and find a quiet place on school grounds to start discussing and planning your projects,” she said, glancing away for a moment as she was distracted by an escalating squabble between Luke and Pratters. As a few groups began to pack their things into their bags to head out, she called her familiar mantra across the room. “Just remember to please be committed and constant and fair to each other.”

A few pods over, Zach and his group began tucking things into their backpacks to go and find a place to work. Sheri glanced around the pod at the other members of her group, all of whom avoided eye contact with her, and with one another.

“Should we go and find somewhere to talk about how we’re going to do this?”

Justin nodded, but his shrug was reluctant and non-committal. Chloe was slightly more enthusiastic, offering a smile as she began to pack away her things, but Sheri thought that was more of a show of support for her, in the face of the boys’ lack of interest, than any genuine eagerness to discuss the project. Unexpectedly, Monty grinned as he shoved his things into his backpack, crumpling the worksheet carelessly.

“Well, this fucking sucks.” He said, shaking his head and he yanked at the zipper on his backpack, the tendons in his hand shifting beneath the dark bruise. “Fuck me for thinking nothing could make this day worse than it already was.”

Rubbing his stomach beneath his varsity jacket, Justin mumbled his agreement. 

As she slipped her books and pencil case back into her bag, Sheri couldn’t help but check her phone.

No missed calls. No messages.

“Yeah,” she sighed as she zipped her bag closed. “Me, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies this is a little late - it was a holiday here yesterday and the time got away from me!
> 
> Thank you to [ closetfascination ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetfascination/pseuds/closetfascination) for the beta-reading, encouragement and chats!
> 
> I hope that this chapter was a little bit of a reprieve from the overall melancholy in this story, and that a few of the s1 character making an appearance was satisfying. 
> 
> Shout out to a few resources I used for this chapter:  
> \- [ the Hot or Not List ](https://13reasonswhy.fandom.com/wiki/The_List#cite_note-:0-1) on the 13RW wiki provided a bunch of names for the cheerleader's gossip  
> \- this [ fan-made timeline ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16211879/chapters/38289248) of s1 and s2 has to be the single reference resource that I use the most when I write, it has saved me *so much time* rewatching, and it is invaluable if you are writing canon-compliant in the earlier seasons
> 
> The next update should be on time next week and will be another set of mini scenes, as always we'll have Justin and Sheri (in part 1 of a two parter), Monty and Chloe, and for the first time since Christmas, Justin and Monty. 
> 
> Thank you as always for reading and commenting x


	10. Rest Break

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next set of mini-scenes. This time around we have:
> 
> \- Monty and Justin, commiserating a football game loss  
> \- Justin and Sheri, in part one of a two part scene which we be resolved after the next chapter  
> \- Chloe and Monty, as little kids doing little kid stuff!

The mood on the bus was far more subdued on the way home from their away game than it had been on the drive up.

The Central High Grizzlies hadn’t wiped the floor with them – the final score settling at 52-49 – but it hurt to lose, all the same.

No one wanted to be a loser. 

Bryce certainly didn’t, sulking at the front of the bus, dumping his duffel bag onto the seat beside him and turning his head toward the window as Justin climbed on board. They had ridden to Fresno side by side, laughing and talking with the other guys, but Justin wasn’t surprised that his demeanour had taken a sharp about-face. Justin had missed a tackle just before half-time, overbalancing and hitting the turf as his man twisted free of his grasp, and then proceeded to sack Bryce hard enough that the grill of his helmet had torn a rivet in the field. Bryce had staggered to his feet, spitting blood and dirt, and elbowed past Justin when he went to check that he was OK. 

They hadn’t spoken since. 

As Justin passed, Bryce refused to look at him, arms folded across his chest and shoulders hunched in his Liberty Tigers sweater. 

Justin made his way down the aisle of the bus. Charlie, ever reliable for a smile and a splash of optimism, was sitting beside Zach, enthusiastically discussing the positives he had taken away from the game – ideas for improving his own manoeuvres and polishing the plays that had failed. Zach nodded along good-naturedly, but glanced at Justin as he passed. The guys gave Zach shit for being soft, and it wasn’t a totally unearned label. Zach took things to heart, including losses on the field, and Justin knew that the other boy would have preferred to have licked his wounds in peace, but was too kind to ask Charlie to give it a rest. 

Normally, Monty and Diego sat together, but Diego had made one of the best plays of the night, levering himself up and over his opponent to make a thrilling catch, and despite their overall loss, Luke had been gushing about it ever since. Even now, he had an enthusiastic arm wrapped around Diego’s neck as he recounted an enthralling play-by-play to Scott and Ramon, in the seat ahead of them, as if the two boys hadn’t been present and seen it with their own eyes. 

“Goddamn, that little yearbook geek better have some good shots of that catch, or I’m gonna toss him in the trash.”

Luke mimicked dunking a basketball with his free hand, as if he could pick up and throw a human being with such ease, and the other boys laughed, while Diego shook his head. 

“Dude-” he protested, but Luke held up a finger to cut him off.

“If he missed the shot of the year, him and those fancy cameras belong in the bin,” he insisted, his tone entirely reasonable. “I don’t pay sixty dollars for a mediocre yearbook.”

Diego chuckled, nudging his elbow into the larger boy’s side.

“You mean, your parents don’t.”

Diego grinned, eyes bright with mischief, and then realised his mistake when Luke tightened the arm still looped around his neck, scrubbing at his scalp with his knuckles while Scott and Ramon egged him on. Justin ducked out of the way of a stray elbow as the scuffle almost spilled off of the seat and into the aisle as he passed.

Monty sat behind them. Like Bryce, his bag was on the seat next to him. Unlike Bryce, he moved it as Justin approached. It was graceless and mostly reluctant, one fist closing around the strap and dumping it on the floor between his feet. He glanced up at Justin, but didn’t appear to expect any gratitude, turning his gaze back to the window as the other boy sat beside him.

“Thanks,” Justin muttered as he sat, slipping his duffel beneath the seat ahead of them. 

Monty just lifted his shoulder in a shrug. 

Justin got it. 

He was one of the last onto the bus, and could only assume that Bryce hadn’t even bothered with the thin excuse of his bag occupying the seat beside him when Monty had gotten on ahead of him. Justin figured that even Monty wouldn’t have been so thick-skulled as to try to sit with the other boy. Aside from the fact that Bryce practically radiated wrath when he was in a mood like this, he and Monty had gotten into it on the field. Bryce, well beyond the end of his tether by that stage, had grabbed the other boy by the elbow to pull him up from the ground after he had been buried beneath three linesmen the moment he took a catch, only to shove Monty in the chest as soon as he gained his feet. They had devolved into an argument, stepping up on each other to the point that their face guards clashed, and it had only ended when Luke and Diego had gotten between them, Luke pushing Monty in the direction of Kerba, who was trying to recall him to the bench to be checked over for injuries following the heavy tackle. 

As the bus pulled away from the curb, Justin glanced at the other boy.

“He’ll get over it,” he said quietly. 

He didn’t have to say his name. They both knew who he meant. 

Monty shifted away from him, tipping his head against the window and closing his eyes.

“Shut up, Justy,” he muttered, but it was tired and hollow, empty of any of his usual antagonism. 

By the time they reached the highway, Monty was asleep, each breath shallow but even, his shoulders relaxed and his hands, almost always tightened into fists, loose in his lap.

As the bus settled into a constant, rumbling rhythm on the highway, Justin tipped his head back against the seat, and closed his eyes. 

~

“OK, but like, what does it mean?” Justin wanted to know. “ _Stay gold_?” He sniffled at the other end of the line. “Is it some kind of, you know, like a way to say that he’s the best of them, the good one? And he should stay that way?”

Sheri smiled, propping her chin in her hand, and lowered her copy of _the Outsiders_ to look at Justin over Skype.

“You mean like a metaphor?” she guessed, then paused, waiting while he coughed into his hand, the sound rough and damp. She raised an eyebrow. “You OK?”

Justin nodded.

“Yeah, yeah, like a metaphor,” he croaked, then cleared his throat, swiping the sleeve of his sweater across the end of his reddened nose. “And yeah, I’m OK.” He coughed once more, for good measure. “Fuck this flu, though.”

Justin had been out all week sick. Zach had dropped over his Math and History homework, and Bryce had texted him the pages that they had covered in their Biology textbooks, along with a photo of the butterfly chrysalis they had been tasked with looking after as an experiment contributing to the practical portion of their grade. Sheri’s task was to make sure that he met next week’s deadline for submitting his book report in English. 

On the floor beside her bed, Peach’s entire body rumbled with a snore. Her legs stuck out at precise angles from her body, accommodating her round, pregnant belly. Downstairs, the television was on, the volume on the football game turned up, as if out of spite, even though it had been hours since her mother had wheeled her small travel suitcase down the front driveway and loaded it into the back seat of a cab. It was large enough to facilitate a weekend away, perhaps four days, at a pinch, if she dressed light and wore a couple of things twice. 

It wasn’t the first time her mother had made that trip down the driveway, suitcase in tow, and Sheri knew it wouldn’t be the last. 

Although they were creeping closer. 

She felt it, in the absence of her mother from the house, the stillness that followed the latest argument, the way her father sank into the couch cushions, defeated.

They were close, now, to the last one: the last fight, the last furious march down the driveway, the last cab. 

Sheri tried not to think about it too much. 

“Well, you’re not wrong,” she said, glancing over her notes from English. “Read literally, it’s a reference to the poem Ponyboy recites while they’re hiding in the church,” she explained, while Justin scratched his pen over a page in his notebook. “But it’s also meant to refer to innocence, or their _goodness_. In the poem, the gold is lost, like their innocence, through all of the fighting and then, the murder.”

Justin nodded along and, on the phone screen, glanced over his shoulder toward the closed bedroom door. Sheri could see his crumpled bedcovers, wrinkled from a week of recuperating, and on his bedside table, beneath a lamp with a crooked shade, was a collection of mismatched glasses filled to various levels with water, a mostly empty bottle of Gatorade, and a scrunched mound of used tissues. 

Blinking off his distraction, Justin looked down at the notes he’d taken.

“So, but wait-“ he cleared his throat; a wet, hacking sound, “-if the murder already happened, then he’s already fucked, right? Ponyboy didn’t do anything to stop Johnny, so he’s just as guilty. His goodness is already gone.” Clearwater blue eyes, mournful and bloodshot, turned toward her. “He can’t ever be _gold_ again.”

Sheri bit her lip.

She wasn’t sure they were still talking about Johnny and Ponyboy. 

“Well,” she said, considering. “I think, if he _wants_ to do better, and be good, then-“

There was a clatter of sound, and Peach startled awake with a pre-emptive bark, eyes wide with confusion when she couldn’t immediately identify the source. 

On Sheri’s phone, the view over Skype tilted as Justin got up from the bed, his hurried movements tipping the camera toward the cracked plaster of the bedroom ceiling. Sheri reached for her phone, drawing it closer. 

“Justin?”

There was a sudden burst of shouting and a thunder of movement, overlapping voices and thudding, a faraway banshee shriek, rough-edged cursing and the slam of doors and heavy footfalls. Sheri could see nothing but the ceiling, and for one brief second, a flash of something that looked like the colour of Justin’s sweater, as someone bellowed,

“ **Police! On the ground!** ”

Sheri bolted upright into a sitting position, snatching her phone in both hands. Heart hammering in her chest, she watched, the crack in the plaster eerily still despite the flurry of sound and movement off-screen, grunting and swearing, distant wailing, and the sound of breaking glass. And then, unnerving silence. 

At the edge of her bed, Peach sat upright, her spine rigid despite the heavy round curve of her belly and her jaws quivering. 

“Justin?” Sheri called, cautiously. 

A hand reached across the screen.

Sheri glimpsed a brown sheriff’s deputy’s jacket and an empty gun holster, the clasp popped open, before the Skype call was disconnected. 

Her throat tight with horror and adrenaline pumping blood to her frantically beating heart at a deafening volume, Sheri stumbled out of the room and down the stairs, her phone clutched in one hand and Peach lumbering at her heels. 

“Dad, I need to borrow the car,” she said, the words gasped in the space of one breath, before she had fully stepped into the living room and realised that he was asleep in front of the football game, his chin tipped down against his collarbone, his chest rising and falling in a slow, even rhythm. 

Leaving him there, Sheri snatched the keys from the dish on the counter by the coat hooks, flung the door closed behind her, and ran down the driveway to the car, still wearing her slippers as she climbed inside. 

She reversed down the driveway, crunching the gears when she reached the street. As Sheri pulled away, the tires issuing a brief shriek of protest as she stamped on the accelerator, Peach walked in a circle at the mat inside the kitchen door, then walked another, for good measure, and lay down to wait. 

~ 

The chatter of birds and rustle of tiny creatures moving through the leaf litter filled the woods around them with movement and sound as they walked. The summer sun curved high in the early afternoon sky, but the path they followed was shielded from the pressing heat by the boughs of the grey pine, California ash and sycamore trees soaring overhead. Loose leaves and broken twigs clung to the pink tinsel-flecked shoelaces of Chloe’s sneakers, but she didn’t bother to brush them loose, both small hands wrapped around a plastic Tupperware container from her mother’s kitchen cupboard. Monty led the way, a green and white plaid shirt pulled on over his _Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles_ tee, and rainbow-coloured sour straps dangling from the pocket of his shorts. There was the shadow of a bruise the size and shape of a boot-heel on the back of his calf, but he didn’t mention it, and slowed only to check the wooden sign erected at the edge of the path.

Chloe paused when he chuckled.

“Yo, what the fuck?”

Chloe leaned closer to peer around his shoulder but stumbled back a step when Monty turned suddenly, a large insect with a hundred tiny, waving legs pinched and wriggling between his thumb and forefinger. 

Her pulse fluttered nervously as he brandished his find, but Chloe trusted him not to bring it any closer than she wanted, and took a step nearer to peer at it. It was difficult to tell which end was the head, but she decided it was the one adorned with what looked like twitching antennae. Looking at him past the insect, she grinned.

“Cool.”

Curiosity satisfied, Monty set the bug gently on the edge of the wooden signpost where he had found it, and they watched it march up and over the highest beam, out of sight, before continuing on their way. 

The waterhole was deep and cold, even at this time of year, but it wasn’t their destination today. They climbed down the rocks toward its edge, Chloe carefully tucking the plastic container against her side and pinning it there with her elbow, freeing one hand to steady herself, while Monty scuffed his knees and elbows and the soles of his sneakers clambering ahead of her heedlessly, taking the most direct route without a moment of consideration for the safest or easiest path. 

Chloe hesitated, uncertain whether to attempt to tackle a steep section of the descent forwards, backwards, or by sitting and scooting down, which would no doubt result in questions from her mother about how her shorts had gotten so dirty. Monty looked over his shoulder below her, already a few paces away and about to climb down the next stage. Seeing her hesitation, he backtracked and reached up to take the container from her. Once if was set safely to one side, he turned back to offer his hands. Chloe crouched to grasp them, letting him balance her weight as Monty shifted her hands, one by one, to his shoulders, then took her by the waist, and between them, they levered her smaller frame down. 

For a moment, their faces hovered so close together that she could see the tiny faded scar at the edge of his lower lip, the three freckles on the left side of his nose that formed a perfectly straight line, and the amber flecks in his eyes. It was oddly intimate, and Chloe blinked and stumbled over both of their feet, trying to find her balance. 

“Had your cooties shot?” she joked, nudging him in the ribs with her elbow. Monty grinned, turning to collect her Tupperware container and hand it to her.

“Why? You got cooties?”

Chloe groaned her disgust, and they dissolved into giggles as they climbed down the rest of the way, pausing to each chew one of the sour straps that Monty drew from his pocket, allowing the candy to dangle over their chins like rainbow tongues. 

O the deepest rockpools still held fast at the edge of the waterhole, their shallower counterparts lost to evaporation beneath the summer sun. They skirted the rim of each one, peering into the still water below, searching for movement. The thin wisps of cloud slipping lazily overhead toward the bay in the south dimmed the reflection of the deep blue sky on the surface of each pool, and Chloe waited at the edge of one, watching, while Monty tugged a pair of glasses from the pocket of his shorts and slipped them on, peering into one of the larger pools.

When she saw it, Chloe dropped to her knees with excitement, scuffing her shin on the rocks.

“Here!” she called, tearing the lid from the Tupperware and tossing it aside. She plunged the container into the water as Monty hopscotched between the pools to crouch at her side. 

Chloe drew the container from the pool, grimy water sloshing over her hands as she held it aloft, and they both peered up at it, her tongue at the corner of her mouth and the lenses of Monty’s glasses mucky with careless thumbprints. They watched as the water settled, the dirt drifting to the bottom, leaving the life inside to swim, freely and visibly. Chloe looked at Monty, and they both grinned.

“Tadpoles!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you as always to [ closetfascination ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetfascination/pseuds/closetfascination) for the beta reading, workshopping, encouragement and chats! 
> 
> The Monty and Chloe scene is based on [ this drawing ](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lxLzr3ymR0C764gDMevTVG3O7UmNi3CT/view?usp=sharing) by sono, which was prompted by their friendship in Dizzy, and which I absolutely adore. You can see more of sono's gorgeous art on [ instagram ](https://www.instagram.com/apricity_bloom/?hl=en).
> 
> The next chapter is from Chloe's POV and will follow directly from the introduction of the group project. 
> 
> Thank you as always for reading and commenting x


	11. Chloe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The group work through how to deliver their family story project while protecting their carefully guarded secrets.

**August 2017**

Despite that their group had begun packing up first, Courtney had spent so long pitching ideas for presenting their project that Chloe and her group left the Communications classroom ahead of them. Zach to jogged down the hallway to catch up, huffing slightly as he hovered behind them, his own group lagging a few yards back, chatting about workloads and availability to meet up around homework, jobs and extra-curriculars. 

“Somebody trade with me,” Zach begged as they walked toward the rear exit. “ _Please_.”

“Not a fucking chance,” Monty answered, resolutely and without even bothering to look back at the other boy, retrieving the protein bar from the pocket of his varsity jacket and tearing open the packaging. 

“No way, dude,” Justin shook his head, grinning with amusement at Zach’s predicament. “Courtney, Twilight, and Jensen?” He chuckled as Zach groaned. “No, thanks.”

“Sheri,” Zach tried, attempting to replicate Justin’s famously effective puppy dog eyes. It wasn’t the worst attempt Chloe had ever seen, he did manage to look sort of sweet and forlorn, but it lacked the undeniable power of Justin’s trademark expression. “You’re friends with Clay, right?” He nodded encouragingly as she looked back at him over her shoulder. “Switch with me? Please?”

Sheri smiled at him sweetly. 

“Sorry, Zach. Mrs Bradley said two boys and two girls in each group,” Sheri shrugged, her voice kind but flavoured with just a splash of amusement as she raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you’ll learn something interesting that you didn’t know about them?” She suggested. “It could be fun.”

Justin smirked and made a half-assed attempt to hide it. Monty scoffed, scrunching the package of the protein bar in one hand, and shook his head. 

Zach looked unconvinced.

Chloe tried to reassure him with a smile. 

“Between Courtney and Clay, at least you know there won’t be any slacking off,” she said. “And you won’t. be scrambling to finish at the last minute.”

Justin raised his eyebrows, joining in.

“Yeah,” he added, the playfulness in his tone matching the bounce in his step as he slid a sideways look at Zach. “And if you work in the library, at least you know you won’t get interrupted by any noisemakers,” He grinned. “Because Twilight will rip their fucking heads off.”

He and Monty snorted with amusement and, in the spirit of riling Zach, when Justin raised his hand for a high-five, Monty held out his own, palm up. Zach rolled his eyes as Justin’s hand arced downwards, the hearty slap loud and taunting in the otherwise empty hallway. 

As if to add insult to injury, Courtney’s voice wafted from the behind them as the other group made a right, heading toward the library.

“So, I bet the library reserve section has great resources about local family history, and my dads have boxes and boxes of scrapbooks from the adoption process, it’s like a natural history museum archive or something.” Courtney made this sound somehow fascinating, although Chloe expected that anyone outside of her family forced to sit through that particular history lesson would be bored to tears. “Anyway,” she continued, her audience trapped as they rounded the corner, “wouldn’t it be really cool if we found out that we had ancestors in common? I-“ Courtney paused, and her head appeared from around the row of lockers lining the wall, her eyebrows drawn together in a frustrated frown as she called, “Zach, are you coming?”

Zach threw them all a final pleading look, and received a quartet of sweet smiles and friendly waves goodbye for his efforts.

“All of you suck,” he grumbled, shoving his hands into his pockets as he turned to trail after his group. 

While the boys chuckled at his misfortune, Chloe wrapped her hands around the straps of her backpack, and tried not to panic. 

It had been a nice momentary distraction, Zach’s frustration at his group allocation, but it was also a reminder that being stuck with a trio of classmates he wasn’t particularly fond of was the worst of Zach’s worries. Chloe figured that his mother probably had albums of family photos, ornate and detailed family trees that stretched back to the ages of dynasties and told the storied history of their privileged bloodline. After all, this was the mother who had sent Zach to school during culture week in freshman year wearing an authentic, antique, traditional _changsun_ shipped all the way from the province in China that his ancestors hailed from. She certainly had enough spare change to pay for every photograph and document signified by a little green leaf on Ancestry.com, or fund her own private investigator, if she fancied. 

The Dempseys were a family of wealth and influence in Evergreen, well-known and well-liked around the county, the perfect, smiling, nuclear family – mother and father, sister and brother – respectable and pressed from the mould of the American dream. 

It was a family story handmade for telling.

And what did she have?

A father who hadn’t wanted her, a mother who had replaced her with a younger, cuter half-sister, and a step-father who despised her. 

And as she followed the group out through the far doors, uncertain where they were headed, Chloe realised that amongst them, her family story was possibly the least broken and wretched.

The boys led the way, and although they didn’t speak or even really look at each other, they each dumped their bags down at a table on the back quad, as if their destination had been obvious. Sheri slid onto one of the seats, setting her backpack on the table, and Chloe took the last space, between her and Monty. 

As Justin and Sheri unpacked their notebooks, Chloe settled her backpack in her lap. In the space of a half-second, she ran a visual assessment of the boy to her left. It had been hard to see in the dark the night before as he climbed over the windowsill, and he had been gone from where he had been dozing at the end of the bed by the time she woke, still lying in the tight curl she had tucked herself into beneath the blankets to give him space. Now, she could see the water-stain shadows of exhaustion that darkened his eyes, and the black bruise that crept from the knuckles of his right hand below the cuff of his jacket, the result of an accusation of taking cash from his father’s wallet and a weaponised, mostly-full bottle of tequila. Monty’s gaze met hers for a fraction of a second and, almost imperceptibly, he lifted his chin in a reassuring nod.

To her right, Sheri pulled a snack-sized KitKat from her backpack, and split it in half, offering one of the fingers to Justin. He flashed a grin, popping it in his mouth, then glanced around as he chewed. 

“So, um,” Justin twirled his pen between his fingers anxiously. “We’re not… we’re not going to do like, family trees, or whatever Courtney and those guys are doing, right?” He smiled briefly, an anxious dimple curving at the edge of his smile for a moment, wagging a raised pinkie finger to demonstrate. “Mine, ah- mine’s a little more like a twig.”

Monty snorted at the vague double entendre, and Justin rolled his eyes, but couldn’t quite keep himself from smirking. 

“I got no siblings, no aunts, no uncles, and never met any of my grandparents,” Monty offered, “So I guess that makes mine, like,” he leered, amused by the obvious one-upmanship to Justin’s offering, and pumped his fist up and down as if it were wrapped around something thick, “A fucking totem pole?”

Sheri frowned, puzzled, while Justin started to laugh. 

“That’s not how a family tree works,” Sheri tried to explain, her tone gentle but barely pressing down her amusement. 

“Dude,” Justin wheezed in between chuckles. “That would make, like, your parents each other’s parents.”

Sheri giggled, Chloe smiled, and Monty just shrugged, grinning. He didn’t bother to get anything out of his bag, propping his elbows on the tabletop. He was clearly either disinterested in taking down any information, or perhaps passively protesting the project as a whole. 

Chloe couldn’t help but feel the same way, and as she dutifully uncapped her pen, she wondered if maybe the jokes were a futile and thinly veiled attempt to delay acknowledging that, at some point, they would have to take the whole thing seriously. 

“So, family trees, twigs and totem poles are out,” Sheri said, drawing their attention back to the task at hand. “Any other ideas?”

Chloe looked down at the assignment sheet, slipped into the open page of her notebook. Over the past weeks, they had been discussing storytelling, memory, and perspective, and the way that those concepts affected the formation of history over time, contributed to a self-perception, and created a sense of belonging. They had discussed storytelling in many forms. First, they learned about ancient practices of oral storytelling, the use of fables and allegories to impart lessons and history through tales, the use of visual stories before modern writing practices had been developed, from hieroglyphs to cave paintings. Later, they had moved on to modern and relatable applications, like gossip and rumours. They experimented by playing a game of pseudo-Chinese whispers, each of them tasked with subtly altering the message as it passed from one student to the next, and then discussed how far the final message had twisted from the original, and how their individual changes both reflected their own personality and context, and influenced the next change in the chain. 

“Maybe rather than a whole family story, we could just focus on the story of just one family member?” Sheri suggested, glancing at the others to gauge their reactions. “We could pick who we want that person to be, come up with a set of questions as a group, or just ask them to tell us about their life like, freeform, and then I guess we could decide if we want to talk to them as a group, or kind of, swap each other for a relative?”

Monty’s expression was guarded and stony. Justin didn’t look quite so reluctant, but he bit his lip, his gaze on his notebook. Chloe understood. While the idea of limiting the stories to only one family member allowed them the control of choosing who to filter the narrative through, for some of them – if she was honest, for all of them – that was a dubious and limited luxury. For Justin, who had no family other than his mother, as far as she knew, and for Monty, who had contact only with his parents, realistically, there was no choice at all. 

And what choice did Chloe have, other than her mother? The idea of one of the boys transcribing her mother’s life story made her squirm. Would they understand what it had been like, a teenage girl growing up in a trailer park with a single father? Would they judge her for who she had once been, the kind of wife who spent her time tanning and peeling and tending to her hair and nails, shopping for clothes and beauty products, going to lunch and day drinking? What would they write about the divorce? How would her mother feel, being asked to talk about it? What would she say? That it had been her fault? That it had been Chloe’s?

Chloe tapped her pen anxiously on the edge of her notebook. Although she felt terrible for thinking it, she felt a little envious of Monty and Justin. Presumably, under Sheri’s proposal, they couldn’t interview their own family members, and considering the scarce options to choose from in each of the boy’s families, the likelihood that she would be allocated one of their parents was undeniable. Chloe wasn’t sure whether it would be worse to be tasked with speaking to Amber Foley or Big Monty about their lives, to try to understand, or maybe to avoid coming to know, how they had become the people and parents the rumours and gossip around town painted them as. Both prospects terrified her, but her tongue felt thick and dry in her mouth, choking any protest or concerns she might have voiced. 

Justin was the one who eventually spoke up.

“My Ma just started a new job,” he said, haltingly, and Chloe wasn’t quite certain if it was a half-truth or an entirely fabricated excuse, but she wouldn’t begrudge him it, either way. “I don’t know if she’ll have time to answer questions or, tell her story, or whatever.”

Monty cocked an eyebrow, but nobody said anything. 

Chloe re-read the worksheet, propping her chin in her hand, her mind churning through the assignment requirements desperately, sieving for a solution that would allow her – them, each and all of them – to control their narratives, to protect their secrets, to press back those things that were dark and that hurt, and to present only what that little shard of themselves that they wanted other people to see. 

“Well, what about…” she started, speaking before the idea had even fully formed, the proposal still developing as she scanned the assignment objectives again, “…we don’t involve our families. What if we all write each other’s stories?”

Justin glanced sidelong at her. Beneath his fingers, the corner of the open page of his notebook had been folded over on itself, an anxious, repeating pattern.

“So, like what Sheri was saying, but we tell the story, instead of our parents, or whoever?” he clarified, glancing around at the others. 

“Sort of,” Chloe confirmed, voicing the idea as it unspooled, “But we rather than each of us writing one person’s story, or all of us collaborating on a single story per person, we could all write one for each group member.” She turned slightly toward Sheri. “So, for your story, Justin, Monty and I would all write our own version.”

Justin frowned, confused.

“Wouldn’t that just be a bunch of copies of the same thing?”

Monty, who had slouched forward, chin resting on his folded arms, raised his eyebrows. 

“Thrilling.”

Sheri, however, nodded her encouragement. 

“I think it’s a good idea,” she said, looking at each of the boys, and then at Chloe. “If we all write a version of the story, we can submit three different versions of each one. From one story, we’ll each find different things interesting, or funny, remember different details, emphasise different things, write in different styles.” As she spoke, she broke into a smile, her shoulders relaxing minutely beneath her Liberty cheer-squad tee. She looked down at the assignment sheet and circled a couple of words. “It would cover perspective and memory, for sure.”

Chloe glanced at each of the boys, who still appeared uncertain.

“By telling the stories to each other verbally, we can cover oral storytelling-“ she managed, by a slim margin, not to roll her eyes when Monty snorted at the word _oral_ and the two boys exchanged an amused smirk. She worked on placing ticks next to the keywords in the assignment outline as they were addressed, glancing up between each check-mark to watch for any shift in their hesitant and guarded expressions. “And the stories, they don’t have to be, like, _the_ story of our life, or our family.” Chloe lifted her shoulder in a shrug. “Mrs Bradley said that we should be creative with how we interpret the assignment. It could be _a_ story, like the story that we choose, that we want to tell about our family.” 

Justin’s fingers stilled, a third of his notebook page folded tightly, and his expression gradually shifted toward thoughtful. 

“Like, you could pick maybe just one thing that happened in your family that you remember really well, or a story you grew up hearing,” Chloe continued. 

She glanced at Monty, who sat casually, but maintained an impenetrable expression. “Or it could be more like those fables and allegories that we learned, an exaggerated version, or like a fairy-tale based on the truth, that makes the story exciting, and something you want to share.”

Justin chewed on the end of his pen – the plastic casing already pockmarked with the overlaid impressions of his teeth – and considered.

“That’s a lot of options,” he mused, his tone subtly shifting from hesitation to interest. “Do we need to pick one type of story and all agree on it?”

Justin made an effort to be subtle about it, but his glance at Monty was unmistakable. If Monty noticed, he didn’t attempt to argue that he was most likely to be the disagreeable one amongst them. Politely, Sheri ignored the insinuation, pursing her lips thoughtfully.

“I think it kind of adds to the assignment,” she said, after a moment of consideration. “We can choose how we present our own stories to each other, and then each person re-telling the story will add their own perspective.” She nudged Justin’s elbow with her own, referring back to his concern about their stories being dull reproductions of each other. “That way, the stories should all be different.”

Justin nodded agreeably, and even Monty raised his eyebrows.

“So, how do we do this?” he asked, tipping his head where his chin was propped on his folded arms. “Who goes first?”

His tone made it clear that he was not volunteering for the position. 

No one else rushed to offer to lead off, either. 

After a moment, Sheri sighed, rolled her eyes, then smiled.

“I’ll go first,” she said, shrugging despite the reluctance in her tone. “Might as well get it over with.”

Justin looked guilty, his eyes rounding and his lower lip beginning to pout. 

“I can go second,” Chloe offered, even as Justin opened his mouth to do the same, and his shoulders relaxed minutely beneath his varsity jacket. 

“I’ll go third,” he confirmed, his elbow sliding across the table to nudge Monty’s. “Lucky last, so you better make it a good one.”

While Chloe and Sheri made notes, Monty’s books and pens still in his bag with no indication that he intended to unpack them at any point, and Justin’s notebook page folded beyond use, they agreed on the ground-rules. Over the next four weeks, they would make use of the weekends – the best opportunity to scratch out a time in between school, homework, jobs, sports and extra-curriculars – and would tell their story to the others in a single sitting. They wouldn’t ask the storyteller any questions; it was up to the individual how they told their story and the level of detail they offered. They could choose whether or not they wanted to take notes or write from memory, or change the story somehow, creating a fairy-tale or a parable, a wholesome narrative suitable for bedtime telling or a gritty adventure traversed by a hero. They would have the days in between each weekend storytelling session to write, and to meet the two-thousand-word minimum requirement of the assignment and share the workload equally, would each write no less than two-hundred words per story. 

The last item left to decide was where they would meet to tell their stories. 

“We could meet up at my house,” Sheri said kindly, before anyone else felt obliged to offer, either an invitation or an excuse. “My dad normally works late.”

Monty just shrugged, and Justin nodded, but Chloe bit her lip.

“Does your dad still have that big dog?” she asked, aiming for politely curious, and hoping that the tension she could feel quivering beneath the words wasn’t evident to anyone else. 

Sheri smiled.

“Oh, yeah. But Peach is a big baby, honestly.” She chuckled, shaking her head. “A big, one-hundred-pound baby that will lick you to death, but still a baby.”

Monty’s expression didn’t shift, but he eased back to sit upright, sliding his hands off of the tabletop and into his lap, one heel bouncing anxiously beneath his seat. Chloe swallowed and plastered on a smile. 

“She’s super sweet,” she agreed quickly. “It’s just that, after that last sleepover, my sister got this rash, and my mom thinks it might be because she washed the pyjamas I wore with her clothes, and she’s, like, super allergic.” Chloe hoped that the explanation didn’t sound as halting and false aloud as it did inside her own head. “It sucks. She promised I could get a Pomeranian when we moved here, and all I ended up with was a naggy little sister.”

Sheri nodded sympathetically and Justin volunteered a solution.

“It’s still summer, right? We’re gonna be at the same parties and matches and shit.” He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “We can just meet up and find somewhere quiet to tell our stories.”

Sheri retrieved her phone, flicking through the calendar for a moment before frowning.

“We don’t have anything coming up this weekend though,” she said, looking up at the group. 

Monty, who had offered little in contribution to their plans so far, spoke up.

“I know somewhere we can go.” 

Once they had agreed on the arrangements, Monty dropping a pin and sharing it with the Whatsapp group that Sheri created for their project, they parted ways, Monty headed down to the baseball nets, Justin off to Geography, and Sheri and Chloe walking together toward the Maths and Science wing, where Sheri had Human Bio and Chloe had Trig. 

“Hey,” Sheri said, nudging Chloe’s shoulder with her own as they walked up the shallow sloping incline toward the building. “I know the boys weren’t all that enthusiastic, but that was a good idea,” she smiled kindly as they approached the entrance. “You know, letting everyone choose what they share, and how they do it.”

Chloe shrugged, her cheeks pinkening a little.

“Oh, thanks,” she muttered, reaching for the door handle.

They parted ways once inside, Sheri offering a cheery goodbye, and Chloe smiled, waving as the other girl turned away. Making a left, she grasped the straps of her backpack, the edge of Courtney’s campaign button brushing against her finger, and bit the inside of her cheek as she headed to class. 

Maybe it was a good idea.

But it didn’t make her feel any less sick about it. 

~

If she stood on the end of her mattress and tipped her head back, Chloe could see over the fence that marked the boundary line between them. If he didn’t draw down the window blind – and he rarely bothered – she could usually count the windows along the side of the house to his room, and make out the lamplight. If it was a particularly dark night, cloudy or moonless, and if he was sitting at the right angle on his bed, sometimes, even if the lights were off, she could make out the glow of his phone. 

It was the beginning of a new moon, the yards between them black as pitch aside from the distant pinpricks of light from the streetlamps, and it was too dark to count the windows, but Chloe could see the soft white light, shifting and flickering with what she imagined was probably a YouTube video of football highlights with the volume turned low, illuminating the square-angled outline of the only visible pane. 

She didn’t know what to text – how to ask, or what to say – so she didn’t. The night air at the tail end of summer was humid but cool-edged, and Chloe pulled on a light, long knitted cardigan that brushed at her calves over her cotton pyjama set, slipped her feet into her unlaced sneakers, and opened her bedroom window. The lawn was bleached a pale shade and the ground baked hard by the long summer days beneath the sun, and the frame of the window was still warm beneath her fingertips as she pressed it closed. The yard was painted in shades of black, the lawn chairs, the coil of the garden house, the playhouse in the corner casting deeper, denser shadows in the dark as she crossed to the fence. 

The palings of the fence were warm and familiar beneath her fingers, worn so soft over years of hands and toes finding the same hold points over and over and over again, that the old wood was smooth like butter beneath her fingers. Chloe levered herself over the top and climbed down the other side, every movement and grasp practiced through growth spurts and broken nails, sports injuries and even that one time, when they were maybe thirteen and forgot to take sunscreen down to the waterhole, and the sunburn on the back of her knees had blistered so badly she was convinced she would live the rest of her life lying on her belly in bed, but had been back to climbing the fence soon enough. 

The lawn on the opposite side of the fence crunched underfoot, uncared for and mostly dead. The scarecrow frame of the washing line was the only shape visible, by a scarce margin, in the yard, and Chloe stepped carefully, making her way to the side of the house, where she ran her fingertips along the still-warm weatherboards to the window. She rapped on the ledge lightly with her knuckles, a tune long and even enough to be identifiable as deliberate and not simply the sounds of the old housing shifting on its foundation, and waited. 

The phone screen on the other side of the glass went dark with a flash, as if it had been hastily discarded, and a moment later, the window opened, squeaking loud enough that she winced at the sound as Monty yanked it upwards in its frame. In the dark, she could see his eyes move over her, panic-quickened, before settling on her face. 

“You OK?” he asked, urgently. 

Chloe bit her lip, a flush of guilt washing through her. She should have texted. 

“Yes,” she reassured him quickly before attempting to explain. “Yeah, I’m sorry.” She shook her head, feeling suddenly silly. “I just… I’m freaking myself out. About this stupid project.” Her hands found each other, despite that she clutched her phone in one, and she twisted her fingers together across the back of the pale pink protective case. Monty looked down at her hands, then back to her face. “It’s just, I don’t know. And-“

“It’s alright,” Monty cut across her, terminating the frantic spiral. He raised his eyebrows, a silent reminder that this was an arrangement born of necessity and turmoil, and while it had grown into something far more complex than that, for both of them, the first thought at the sound of that knock on their window-pane would always be that the other needed help. Perhaps it wasn’t the urgent or physical need that Monty had guessed at – or that he often brought to her – but that didn’t change the terms of the exchange. He tipped his head, one hand holding the window aloft, the other reaching to steady her. “C’mon.”

His phone was discarded on the bed, the screen facing upwards toward the ceiling, and although it had dimmed as it prepared to time out, it was enough light to climb inside by, Monty wrapping one hand around her elbow to balance her as she levered up from the hard, dry ground underfoot to the unsteady surface of the old, narrow mattress. He scooted backwards, leaning back against the wall at the head of the bed, and Chloe sat beneath the window facing him, her legs crossed beneath her.

“I thought limiting it to just one story that we wanted to tell would make it easier for everyone,” she explained quietly as she picked at her shoelace. “But, now, I just… I don’t know what I’m going to say, and then I wonder how Justin must be feeling, and then I feel terrible and stupid, and I keep thinking that I should just ask Mrs Bradley if this is really an appropriate group assignment, but I don’t want her to, like, send me to Porter or something, and…” She trailed off, shaking her head, and looked up at him. “Do you know what story you’re going to tell?”

Monty, knees raised and elbows resting on them, shrugged his shoulders. He was wearing a t-shirt, and without the sleeve of his varsity jacket obscuring it, she could see that the bruise that darkened the back of his hand extended over his wrist. He hadn’t said much about what had happened – only a few words offered towards why as he curled at the bottom of her mattress, the injured hand cradled to his chest – but Chloe estimated it must have taken at least two strikes, maybe three, the tequila bottle brought down like a hammer-blow. 

“I’ll figure out something,” Monty muttered, his tone deliberately calm. It stung her to recognise it. It was the same one he used when he knocked on her window, sometimes battered to the point that she couldn’t imagine how he had made the climb over the fence, and he told her that he was OK, because he didn’t want her to know that he wasn’t. “Thanks for the save, by the way,” he murmured, looking down at his hands in the dark. “With doing the project at Sheri’s.”

He didn’t mention the dog, and he didn’t have to. Chloe saw the way that he shifted his leg closer to his body, a subconsciously protective action, his bruised hand wrapping around his knee. She only shrugged, although he wasn’t looking at her, his voice quiet as he changed the subject, asking, “Are you mad I suggested we go to the waterhole?”

Chloe frowned, shaking her head.

“No,” she said. “Why would I be mad? Because it used to be our place?” She smiled when he glanced up at her uncertainly. “I’m actually looking forward to it,” she reassured him, “It’s been such a long time since we’ve been.” Chloe paused, raising a curious and teasing eyebrow. “What are you going to bring for the picnic?”

Monty grinned mischievously. 

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to [ closetfascination ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetfascination/pseuds/closetfascination) for the chats, encouragement and beta checking, as always! 
> 
> The next update will be another set of mini-scenes, including the resolution to Justin and Sheri's police raid cliffhanger :)
> 
> Thank you for reading and commenting x


	12. Meanwhile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next set of mini scenes. This week we have:
> 
> \- Justin & Sheri - part two  
> \- Sheri & Chloe - at cheer camp  
> \- Chloe & Monty - and Amelia's solution to Monty being on Santa's naughty list

Sheri couldn’t get her phone to connect to the Bluetooth in the SUV – probably something to do with the trembling of her fingers as she stabbed at the buttons and cursed under her breath – so she simply dialled Justin on speakerphone. The first time, it rang to voicemail. And then again. And again. She made four unanswered calls in the three minutes that it took to reach the main road through the centre of town. The fifth time, as she sat waiting at a red traffic light, an automated voice informed her that the voicemail box she was trying to reach was full, and recommended that she try to call again later. 

“Fuck,” Sheri whispered, and made a right, headed south, following the curve of the bay toward the naval yard and the government subsidised housing areas that clung to the lower edge of the county. 

As she bumped over train tracks that ran parallel with the waterside industrial estate, her phone began to ring in the passenger seat, the screen illuminating brightly in the dark. Sheri glanced over, hoping that it wasn’t simply her father calling, wondering why Peach was staring mournfully out the kitchen door and where she, and his vehicle, had disappeared to. 

_Justin._

Sheri stabbed wildly at the connect button, and then speaker, and managed to hit it in time to catch the end of Justin saying,

“-so, yeah. Sorry. About that.”

He still had a blocked nose, all of the sharp consonants rounded, but his tone was calm. Tired, but calm. 

“Oh my god, Justin,” she breathed, adrenaline and worry trampling over simple polite decency and shoving aside any greeting she might have offered. “Are you OK?”

Justin cleared his throat.

“Yeah, no, I’m OK. The cops taped up the apartment and said I can’t go in there tonight. They said they would send another cruiser to pick me up, but I’m gonna call Bryce and see if he’s around,” he paused, and Sheri glanced down to check that the line was still connected. “I just saw you called and wanted to let you know it’s all good.”

_It’s all good_?

Sheri’s heart ached.

“I’m on my way,” she said, even as Justin started to tell her that he would text her later. “I’m just passing the shipyards, now.”

Justin hesitated on the other end of the line. 

“You-“ his voice was tight and quiet. “You don’t have to-“

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” Sheri insisted, and almost winced at how much she sounded like her mother. Not now – not the way that her voice quivered with fury, the way that she bit the words off like rounds of ammunition when her parents fought – but the way Sheri remembered, that warmth and firmness when she would tell her to do things she didn’t want to do, but were for her own good, like eating her greens and doing her math homework. 

“Yeah,” Justin said, barely above a whisper, his voice small and lost. “Yeah, OK. Thanks.”

When she pulled up outside of the apartment complex, he was sitting at the bottom of the steep staircase in the threadbare grey sweater and Tigers sweatpants he had been wearing as he sat on his bed talking through his English homework. He had his Liberty duffel bag, but no shoes, his feet shoved into socks with a hole in the toe, and his arms wrapped around himself in the chill night air. Sheri turned up the heating as she watched him walk down the path to the car, his head down and his hands jammed into his pockets. 

“Thanks,” he mumbled again, avoiding her gaze as he climbed in, shoving his bag down between his feet and buckled his seatbelt. When he sniffled, Sheri reached into the console, retrieving the travel packet of tissues she made sure to keep stocked, mostly for her father to lay across his lap when he hurriedly ate greasy service station food for lunch as he drove from one appointment to the next. Justin’s pale cheeks flushed as he accepted them. “Shit,” he muttered. “Thanks.”

As she drove back to the house, Justin explained, haltingly and voluntarily, that the police had arrived unexpectedly to exercise an arrest warrant for his mother’s boyfriend, Seth. Things had quickly become complicated when they had found dime-bags of an _unidentified substance_ and a beat-up old metal lunchbox stuffed with rolls of cash on the kitchen table. 

The moment the deputies had announced they would be conducting a search of the premises based on the plainly sited evidence, his mother had turned into a wildcat, shrieking and clawing, shoving and kicking, and everything had devolved from there. Justin had managed to take his bag from his room – although the deputies had searched it first, checking to make sure he hadn’t hidden any paraphernalia beneath the copy of _the Outsiders_ he had shoved in on top of a change of clothes. 

It was only once he was outside of the apartment, watching them secure crime scene tape over the door, that he realised he had forgotten his sneakers. 

“I have a pair at the pool house,” he shrugged as she pulled up the driveway. “Bryce can bring them to school tomorrow.”

Like the explanation that he had offered, the words were spoken plainly, as if what had happened was just like any other thing that had ever happened. He didn’t talk about what happened next, for him or his mother, the boyfriend or the apartment. He glanced at her, to gauge her reaction, and Sheri smiled, reaching over to touch his knee as she pulled the parking brake up. 

Sheri didn’t have any answers either, about what might happen next, or tomorrow. She didn’t even know what she was going to tell her dad. She just knew that she couldn’t have left Justin in that place. 

When they got inside, Peach had clambered up onto the couch in the living room to sleep, and the house was dark, her father retiring to his room to sleep. Sheri wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t noticed that she was missing. As the arguments between her parents escalated, so did his almost catatonic distraction in their wake, and he would sometimes move about the house as if sleepwalking in the aftermath, a shell-shocked soldier, eyes rounded with panic but unseeing. 

Sheri got Justin settled on the couch with a glass of water, some over the counter cold and flu medication, and the television remote. Although he appeared uncomfortable, glancing around the cosy living room, Peach was thrilled to have a lap to rest her huge head upon and someone scratching her ears, and trapped him there while Sheri went to the kitchen to make Justin something to eat. When she came back with a steaming bowl of oats drenched in honey and an oversized mug of hot chocolate, Justin had sunk into the couch, his feet propped on his duffel bag, his hand on Peach’s head and his eyelids at half-mast. Sheri glanced at the television, instantly recognising the opening shot of the Wonder Wheel at night. 

“Oh, have you seen this?” she asked, and Justin blinked his eyes fully open, perking up at the scent of hot food. 

Justin shook his head, reaching to take the bowl she offered. Sheri set the mug on the side table next to him as he shovelled a heaping spoonful of oats into his mouth without checking the temperature. 

“No,” he said, with only a slight huff on the next inhale to indicate that the oats were slightly hotter than he had anticipated. “What is it?” The temperature didn’t stop him loading another spoonful into his mouth immediately after the first. “Looks fucking old.”

Sheri sat down on the couch at Peach’s tail end, tucking her feet underneath her as the train rolled into the station and _the Warriors_ appeared on the screen in blood-red graffiti. 

“Really?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “You don’t know-“ She hesitated a moment, glancing around, and in the absence of a better alternative, clicked her fingers along with each syllable as she sing-songed, “ _warriors, come out and pla-ay_?”

Justin snorted, the bridge of his nose wrinkling. 

“What? No” he said, shaking his head and loading another spoonful of oats into his mouth. “What’s it about?”

Sheri settled into the couch, reaching to rub her hand gently over Peach’s round tummy. She thought she should probably suggest that they make sure that Justin was prepared to submit his book report in a few days, but he looked tired, and she found her eyes returning to the television screen.

Worst case scenario – a liberal dose of the puppy dog eyes would earn him at least a day’s extension if he needed it. 

“It’s about a gang that gets stuck on the opposite side of the city to their turf, and they have to fight their way back to Coney Island. All the other gangs are trying to find and stop them, and they all have these campy names and costumes, like the Orphans, the Lizzies, who are all girls, the Baseball Furies-“

“Wait,” Justin raised an eyebrow, “A _baseball_ gang?”

Sheri grinned, rolling her eyes.

“Yeah, they wear baseball uniforms and zombie face-paint, and they fight with baseball bats.” Justin chuckled, shaking his head, and Sheri shoved his shoulder gently in protest. “It’s from the seventies, I think,” she explained, while Justin watched along beside her. “I used to watch it with my dad when I was little.” Sheri smiled a little, mostly to herself. “It’s one of his favourites.”

Justin cast her a sidelong look, and shifted the remote control from the arm of the couch, where he might have retrieved it to change the channel, and set it down beside his hot chocolate. He smiled, scooping up another spoon of oats.

“Cool.”

~

If someone had told Chloe, back when she was dressed in a grubby pink sweater and jeans and sneakers, dirt under her nails from digging for insects, her braid wind-torn and her cheeks sunburnt, grazes on her knuckles and her skateboard beneath her feet, that she would be excited to go to cheer camp, she would have laughed.

Probably, she wouldn’t have even known what cheer camp was. 

She was a reformed failed beauty pageant queen. If it didn’t involve kickflips and mischief, she wasn’t interested. 

And yet, here she was, her hair combed into a tight, neat tail of honey curls, her Liberty cheerleading team windbreaker worn over her work-out gear, her duffel packed and slung over her shoulder. As if in a dream, she stepped away from where the bus driver was unloading bags from the storage hold under the bus and moved toward the entrance. She had never been to summer camp until she joined the squad – not even before the divorce, when every part of her parents’ lives, and by extension hers, had been about appearances and expectations. She served that purpose better by trotting around the backyard in a pretty summer dress and buckle shoes, smiling sweetly and charming her father’s clients than she would have riding horses or sailing through the air on a flying fox, pitching a tent or learning how to row a canoe. 

The Liberty squad fundraised to attend every year with all of the normal fare, bake sales and kissing booths, car washes and Powderpuff football, and this year, her first year as vice-captain of the squad, they had made up most of their funding through Dollar Valentines. Their efforts had been tainted by complaints from people who hadn’t received the matches that they had hoped for or had received persistent matches that they wished they hadn’t, and one girl’s parents had even made a formal claim against the school, demanding that they pay for them having to have their daughter’s phone number changed because one lovesick match hadn’t been able to take a hint. But the squad tried not to let Principal Bolan’s exasperation and Vice-Principal Childs’ stern warning that they would not be authorised to rerun the fundraiser next year dampen their excitement as they boarded the bus. 

Chloe remembered arriving as a freshman member of the junior squad and being terrified, the cheerleaders from schools all over the state swirling around her in a kaleidoscope of brightly coloured uniforms, fiercely competitive, strong, confident and beautiful. Clutching the strap of her bag as she peered upwards, most of the attendees towering over her back then, Chloe had wished that she was back home, her skateboard underneath her and the breeze clawing at her hair, the grind of the wheels on the pavement soothing white noise, easing away all of those things that scared her until there was nothing but the movement, her heartbeat, and Monty looking back to make sure she was still following.

Despite her nerves, Chloe had enjoyed herself, and looked forward to camp every year. She smiled and breathed in the electric fizz of excitement bubbling around her as a few girls from the squad joined her. 

“Ouch, Chloe,” Delia Washington raised an eyebrow, peering at her. “That looks like it hurts.”

Angie Romero, standing at Delia’s side, pressed her cherry-glossed lips together to smother her amusement. 

Chloe felt her cheeks flush, and her fingers automatically went to the mark behind her ear. She had tried to lessen the vivid reddish-purple hue with makeup, and considered wearing her hair loose to hide it, but they always wore their aqua blue ribbons around their ponytails on the bus-ride to camp; she worried it would draw even more attention to shirk tradition. 

The worst part was, the date Bryce had taken her on the night before had been perfectly _nice_. He had been a gentleman, pulling out her chair for her, carrying polite and charming conversation with ease, and hadn’t argued when she had said she would only agree to him paying for the meal if he let her pay for the frozen yoghurt that they bought to eat as they walked along the boardwalk afterwards, looking out at the reflection of the stars on the waves and talking about their plans for the summer. He had driven her home in time for her curfew, and those few minutes they had spent in the car before she went inside – his touch on her skin reverent, his lips trailing from her mouth along her jaw to the soft skin below her ear – she had _wanted_ it. She had _enjoyed_ it. 

Now, she felt ashamed, and guilty for feeling that way.

It felt like a betrayal. 

“Ignore her,” Sheri said clearly, appearing at Chloe’s elbow. She lifted her chin, looking at Delia directly. “She’s just salty that she got _Best Face_ but no one will ask her out because she acts like such a horrid bitch all the time.”

Angie smirked at the reference to the infamous Hot or Not List, pursing the lips that had earned her a place on the _hot_ side of the division, while Delia fixed Sheri with a glare. 

“Screw you, _Worst Tease_ ,” she snapped, and stormed away without waiting for the other girls to catch up. Sheri waited, standing protectively at Chloe’s side, but Angie just smiled, more interested in the momentary drama than defending or hurting anyone’s feelings. 

“Worse things to be called than a tease,” she said, shrugging lightly, then nodded for some of the newer girls on the squad to follow her, heading toward the registration area. 

Sheri watched as Angie led the other girl away, and Chloe twisted her fingers together tightly, guilt and dread washing through her in waves. 

“It’s not what it looks like,” Chloe tried to explain, but Sheri shook her head, holding up a hand to stop her. 

“You don’t owe anyone an explanation,” Sheri said, firmly but kindly. “It’s not anyone else’s business but yours.” Her expression softened, and she lowered her hand to slip between Chloe’s tightly linked fingers, gently tugging them apart and giving her hand a soft squeeze. “All that matters to me is that you’re happy and safe.”

Chloe nodded, embarrassment sealing off any other response, and as Sheri motioned for her to follow, the other girl’s fingers clasped around her own warm and reassuring as they followed the other girls to the registration area, Chloe felt a little better.

~

“But you _said_!”

Chloe’s fingers clenched with frustration around the icing bag, ruining the perfectly sized dots she was attempting to pipe onto the Christmas cookies as it spurted from the nozzle. Gritting her teeth, she set to joining up the rest of the dots, disguising the mess as a swirling pattern around the lower half of the bauble-shaped cookie. 

“I _know_ , Amelia,” she said, well past the point of bothering to look over her shoulder, where her younger sister hovered, hands alternating between being perched on her hips and folded across her chest, a pout so deeply situated on her face at this stage that Chloe thought her mouth probably hurt, but the girl stubbornly maintained it, regardless. “He’s not answering his phone. I don’t know what else you want me to tell you.”

Chloe was a little irritated that, after they had all agreed on their plan to bake cookies to persuade Santa Claus to excuse Monty from the naughty list, Monty had gone AWOL all day. This left her to try to bake sugar cookies, cut into the shape of Christmas trees, baubles, bells and snowmen, with Amelia’s _help_ , which mostly consisted of eating raw cookie dough, ruining the shape of every cookie she pressed out of a cutter, and asking for the millionth time when Monty was coming over. She was also left fielding all of Amelia’s questions as her excitement paled to disappointment, then frustration, and then anger. 

But, mostly, Chloe was just worried. 

It showed, she knew, in the imperfect tremor in the piping around the edge of the bells and the decidedly mismatched size and shapes of the carrot noses she piped onto each snowman, distracted every few minutes by glancing at her phone, waiting for a message that apparently wasn’t coming. 

“But-“

Amelia’s next protest was cut off by their mother, who stepped into the kitchen behind her.

“Who’s going to help me put out the carrots and water for Rudolph and his friends?” she wondered aloud, crossing to the fridge and opening the door. She looked over her shoulder at Amelia as she bent to open the vegetable crisper. “I think the reindeer will all be hungry and tired by the time they get here.”

Amelia’s pout eased as she frowned, glancing between the cookies and the pair of carrots that Louise set on the counter, reaching into the cupboard beneath the sink for a dish to fill with water. While Chloe piped the pattern onto the final bauble-shaped cookie, Amelia sighed, rolling her eyes. 

“Two carrots isn’t enough for nine reindeer, Mom.”

Chloe glanced at her mother and caught the hint of a smile that tugged at the corner of her mouth. 

“Well, you have to remember, they have a snack at every house they stop at,” Louise explained reasonably, leading the way toward the back door. Amelia snatched up the carrots and followed at her heels. “So, by the time they get here, they will only need a little nibble.”

Chloe listened to the glass patio door sliding open, Amelia’s voice floating back to her.

“But, wait,” she said, her tone full of curiosity. “Do they eat carrots when they go to houses in China? And Egypt?” The volume and itch rose with excitement. “What do they eat in Italy?”

Chloe couldn’t help but shake her head. Amelia’s elementary school class had spent the last few weeks before winter break working on geography presentations. She had been allocated Italy, and had drawn bowls of spaghetti and steaming pizzas all over her sheet of poster paper, spending most of her time on the handcrafted cuisine artwork, and then squeezing in details about the country’s population, languages, religions, industry and customs around them. 

“I don’t know,” Louise answered, bending to fill the old dish from the hose in the yard while Chloe loaded the bowls of icing and piping bags into the kitchen sink. “Maybe, meatballs?”

As Amelia laughed, Chloe’s phone vibrated, and her gaze flicked to the single word displayed in the push notification.

**Monty**   
_sorry_

Her eyes automatically went to the fence-line, but it looked dark and quiet from what was visible of the little green house over the palings. She reached for her phone.

_are you home?_

His reply popped up almost instantly.

_skate park_

Chloe bit her lip and looked down at the spread of colourfully decorated cookies laid out on the kitchen table. Slipping her phone into her pocket, she retrieved a sandwich bag from the box in the cupboard, and packed it with an assortment of trees, bells, snowmen and baubles. She scrawled her mother a note on the miniature whiteboard affixed to the refrigerator door - _Delivering cookies. Have phone and keys. Won’t be late x_ , paused at the door to pull on her marshmallow pink puffer jacket and grab her skateboard from where it was propped against the wall, and slipped outside.

The early evening air was piercingly cold and the streets were silent and empty, young children tucked up in their beds with promises of gifts beneath the tree in the morning, parents sharing a drink in front of the television or in the kitchen where it was warm, the ham already basting in the oven for lunch tomorrow, or maybe doing some last-minute wrapping before it was late enough to be certain the kids were asleep, and it was safe for Santa to make his rounds. The festive lights strung from gutters and awnings blinked and twinkled merrily as she followed the familiar route, skating a loose, weaving pattern along the centre of the quiet streets. 

The skatepark was a dimly lit spread of valleys and peaks at night, shadows collecting at its edges. Monty wasn’t hard to find. He sat on his board at the edge of the bowl, looking up at her only when she came to a stop, beside him. 

“Amelia’s pissed.”

Monty looked away guiltily. 

“Sorry,” he muttered quietly as she sat down beside him. “I just… couldn’t. Today.”

Chloe got it. While her mother and Amelia set out carrots for the reindeer and cookies for Santa, and while other families looked forward to opening gifts and sharing meals, wearing ugly sweaters, popping crackers and donning paper crowns, even dreading having to pretend to like grandma’s boiled Christmas pudding, it was just another day at Monty’s house. Or it was worse than most days, because most days, the things that he didn’t have didn’t stand out in such stark contrast. Most days, he could pretend like everything was OK, or some version close to it. 

“It’s alright,” she said gently, raising an eyebrow when he glanced at her. “But as far as she’s concerned, you deserve your place on the naughty list.”

Monty smiled, just a little, and dug into the pocket of his jeans. Despite the chill, the sleeves of his plaid shirt were rolled back, exposing the scrape along his forearm where he had climbed into a dumpster at work to retrieve his father’s tape measure, accidentally dropped inside with a stack of wood off-cuts.

“I got her something,” he said, tugging a small package from his pocket. Inside the clear plastic was a tiny cluster of gemstones, strung together in the shape of an angel in shades of pink and white, a loop of silver thread attached to complete the delicate little ornament. Chloe smiled as she turned it over in her hands, and a cheeky smile tugged at the corner of Monty’s mouth. “That grumpy old bitch who always kicks us out of the newsagency was busy wrapping some gross photo frame for Zach’s mom. Didn’t even notice me.”

Chloe thought she should probably scold him for shoplifting, if only for the unnecessary risk, but the thought of getting one over the mean old crone was too sweet to resist, and she grinned as she slid the little angel into her jacket pocket. 

“I made you something,” she told him, switching her hand to the opposite pocket. She drew the plastic sandwich bag of cookies free and held them up, an unexpected spike of anxiety at presenting her afternoon of hard work shooting through her. She couldn’t deny that she had selected the best of the batch to give him, and now felt silly for it. Monty rarely noticed details like that, so unused to caring and thoughtful gestures, that it never occurred to him to look.

A slow smile warmed his face, and he reached for the bag, sliding open the zip-lock. He selected a Christmas tree, and while one hand offered her the open bag, he held the cookie in the other, his attention shifting over the piped edging and decorations, the red hand-drawn tinsel garlands, the silver and white baubles dotted in precise circles, and the tiny gold star, affixed to the top. Chloe chose a snowman from the bag and bit into his iced black top-hat before Monty noticed her watching him. 

“I made you something, too,” he said, setting the bag of cookies down between them to retrieve his phone from his pocket. “You got your phone?”

Surprised, and with the cookie still pinned between her teeth, Chloe nodded, taking her phone from her jacket pocket. He tapped at the screen of his own for a moment, and then hers lit brightly with a push notification – a shared playlist on Spotify. Bewildered, Chloe quietly scrolled through the songs, ranging from their favourite punk bands – Bad Religion, Rise Against, NOFX, the Descendants, the Offspring, the Distillers – to songs from their childhood – Midnight Oil, the Rolling Stones, Cindy Lauper, Bonnie Tyler, Shania Twain – and the songs that they would dance to, to make each other laugh – Fall Out Boy, Madonna, the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys. She knew every song on the list, each one wrapped in a memory. 

She took the cookie still perched between her teeth in her hand and looked at him. 

“You made us a playlist?” Chloe asked, her voice quiet, and Monty shrugged awkwardly, taking one last appreciative look at his cookie before biting it in half.

He brushed crumbs from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand as he muttered, “I didn’t know what to call it.” 

Her heart feeling full and warm and thundering joyously in her chest, Chloe returned her gaze to her phone, and clicked to edit the name of the untitled shared playlist.

_M + C_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you as always to [ closetfascination ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetfascination/pseuds/closetfascination) for the beta reading, encouragement and chats. If you're not already, you should check out her fics, especially [ Wake Up ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29346840/chapters/72084132), a canon-divergent reimagining starting at the end of S3. 
> 
> Next up is Sheri's chapter, and her turn to share for the family story group project.
> 
> Thank you for reading and commenting x


	13. Sheri

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sheri shares her family story with the group.

**August 2017**

Justin and Sheri followed the signs and only got lost once, when they misinterpreted the weathered directions and wound up at a clearing at the foot of a huge tree, identified by a small historical plaque at its base, and had to double back. When they came upon it, the uneven dirt path opening out onto a sloping rockface, the waterhole was quiet and still, the sun mottling the water’s surface in golden peaks and flashes where it broke through the canopy of the trees. Sheri gazed up at the boughs overhead, stretching impossibly high above them, their fingers reaching out over the waterhole like an inverted cradle, a kind of naturally occurring shelter, a safe place.

“The hell are they doing?”

Sheri looked sidelong at Justin, and followed his gaze along the downward angle of the rockface, steep and sheer in some places and staged in others, to the rockpools that clustered at the water’s edge. 

Chloe and Monty were crouching at the rim of a shallow pool, their shoes kicked off by their backpacks, tossed against one another on a nearby rock, the sleeves of Monty’s plaid shirt rolled back and a plastic food container in Chloe’s hands. Frowning, puzzled, Justin and Sheri watched as Monty pointed and Chloe dunked the Tupperware into the water, their shoulders pressed together when they both leaned in to inspect the contents as she held it aloft.

Casting a curious glance at one another, Justin and Sheri headed down toward the rockpools.

“Hey, guys,” Sheri called cheerily, accepting Justin’s hand to take a careful step over a slippery wet patch on the rocks. 

Chloe and Monty looked up. Monty’s cheeks turned a little pink beneath his freckles as he sat back on his haunches, folding his arms across his knees, the back of his hand still mottled with a purple stain that crept from his knuckles over his wrist. There was an apricot coloured peony tucked into the band at the base of the topknot Chloe had scraped her hair into, fresh and lovely. On one of their backpacks, a partially eaten bunch of grapes had been discarded, apparently evicted from the container it had been carried in. 

“Hey,” Chloe grinned, brandishing the container, filled with speckled, stagnant water. “Tadpoles!”

Smiling cautiously, Justin stepped closer to look, while Sheri slid her backpack from her shoulders, setting it down with the others. 

“How do you know this place?” Sheri asked, turning slowly to take in the enormous old trees, the soft carpet of leaf litter beneath the underbrush, golden sunlight through the fingers of the boughs overhead suffusing its warmth and insulating them from the modern bustle of the town at the foot of the nearby cliff. Sheri had lived her whole life in Evergreen County, and never known that it existed. Neither of her parents had ever been outdoorsy, the closest either of them got was perhaps sunbathing on the lounges by the local public pools or watching her from the shade beneath an umbrella while she built sandcastles at the shoreline when she was young. The waterhole reminded Sheri of childhood movies and the pages of her picture books, the kind of lush green hollow where a fairy princess might make her home. “It’s lovely.”

Monty shrugged, glancing at the container of tadpoles, which Justin crouched on the opposite side of the rockpool to peer into, pointing out one that had sprouted legs. 

“Hiking,” Monty answered, and offered no further explanation. 

Once they had returned the tadpoles to the rockpool, Justin kicking off his sneakers and setting aside his backpack before lying on his belly to bring his face as close to the water’s surface as possible to watch them swim, they set about unpacking their picnic.

“I’ve got the boring, healthy snacks covered,” Chloe said, her tone vaguely apologetic as she opened her backpack. Rather than return the bunch of grapes to the container they had used to observe the rockpool’s residents, she handed it to Justin. He rolled onto his back on the warm, flat rocks with the grapes in one hand, shoving his backpack beneath his head as a makeshift pillow with the other. It crackled loudly as he rearranged it. Chloe removed the lids from plastic containers of chopped fruit, plain Greek yoghurt, rice crackers, and an assortment of carrots, celery and bell peppers, cut into fingers. 

“Ooh, hummus,” Justin chirped when she peeled the lid from the final container, and Monty, picking himself up from the other side of the rockpool, raised an eyebrow, shaking his head. 

“Well, I went naughty, and bought sweets,” Sheri announced, sitting cross-legged at the edge of the blanket and pulling her backpack into her lap. She unzipped it and produced a package of chocolate chip cookies, a brown paper bag stamped with Monet’s logo containing an assortment of muffins, and a square Tupperware container, which she held proudly aloft, explaining with a smile, “Plus, I made cake.”

Monty, who had collected his own backpack and set it next to him as he flopped down at the edge of the blanket, peered at the cake with a frown. 

“Why’s it pink?”

Sheri grinned, amused at the implication that eating a pink cake was somehow emasculating. 

“Because it’s raspberry lemonade flavour.”

Monty looked unconvinced, but didn’t comment any further, unzipping his backpack. The clinking of glass bottles gave away his contribution, even before he reached inside with both hands and retrieved two four-packs of premixed whiskey and cola. Justin snorted, amused, but grinned appreciatively as he plucked another grape between his teeth. Sheri shook her head ruefully, accepting one of the bottles as Monty broke them from the cardboard packaging and handed them around.

“Monty,” she said gently, raising an eyebrow. “Not that I don’t enjoy a drink amongst friends, but that’s not really picnic food.”

Monty rolled his eyes, setting the second pack to one side. He levered the cap from his bottle with his teeth, allowing it to roll away down the slope of the rocks in Justin’s direction.

“I made sandwiches as well,” Monty said, only a slight sullen edge to his voice as he tipped the bottle to his mouth and swallowed a large mouthful before digging in his backpack again. They were a little squashed by the bottles he had loaded into the bag on top of them, and he tossed them carelessly on the picnic blanket amongst the girls’ carefully arranged offerings, but the portions of ham, cheese, lettuce and egg salad were generous, and Justin propped himself on his elbow for a better look. Monty nodded toward the other boy, who was rolling his discarded bottlecap along his fingers like a magician’s coin. “What’d Foley bring?”

Justin grinned, rolling into a cross-legged sitting position and setting the bunch of grapes, mostly plucked-clean, in his lap to dig into his bag. In one hand, he brandished a huge packet of barbeque flavoured chips almost the same size as his backpack. In the other, a couple of expertly rolled blunts. 

Sheri couldn’t help but chuckle as Chloe rolled her eyes, an amused smile dimpling her cheek. Justin scooted over to the blanket, passing over the pair of joints when Monty held his hand out for them. Monty inhaled the heavy, sticky scent and sucked his teeth appreciatively. 

“Scotty?”

“His blend,” Justin confirmed, reaching for one of the sandwiches and peeling away the plastic wrap. “But I rolled them.” He wrinkled his nose in concentration, removing the bread from one side of the sandwich and balancing it one hand as he attempted to open the packet of chips in his lap with the other. “His are always crooked and janky.”

Helpfully, Chloe leaned over and opened the bag of chips before Justin resorted to squeezing it against his side and forcing the air pressure inside to burst the seal open. He smiled appreciatively and took a large handful, spreading a liberal layer on top of the existing filling. Sheri raised an amused eyebrow as she leaned over to dip a carrot stick in the pot of hummus, and Justin grinned at her.

“Oh, come on,” he said, glee ringing rich in his voice as he returned the slice of bread to the top of the sandwich, pressing it down with a firm crunch. “You’ll try Cheetos on your hotdog, but chips on a sandwich is too far?”

As Monty cast her a questioning glance over the bottle he tipped to his lips and Chloe smiled, amused, Justin took a large bite of his sandwich, munching happily on his concoction, although he paused between mouthfuls to comment that it might benefit from a bit of hummus. 

While Chloe helped him out, using a couple of veggie sticks as makeshift knives to spread a thick layer of hummus on his half-eaten sandwich, Justin took a drink and cast a sidelong look at Sheri. 

“Should we, like, get our pens out?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder at his discarded backpack, lying open by the rockpool. “So you can tell your story?”

Sheri, a stick of celery at the corner of her mouth like a cigarette while she used both hands to open the package of cookies, glanced at the pair of blunts that Monty had discarded amongst the picnic spread while he unwrapped a sandwich. She plucked the celery from between her lips and offered the cookies to Justin, who took a handful to snack on while Chloe worked on his sandwich improvements. Sheri shook her head. 

“I think I need a to loosen up a little, first,” she said.

She couldn’t deny the fat butterfly wings of anxiety that fluttered heavily in her stomach. 

She had already made her decision and knew what she was going to say. But _saying_ it – that was going to be the hard part.

Because it was exactly the kind of story she _didn’t_ want to tell.

Except, part of her – sort of did. 

After the sandwiches, cookies and most of the muffins had been eaten, the hummus was almost empty and the cake half-devoured, Justin and Monty both accepting her offer of a second slice as if it should have been obvious that they would want more, the boys were even more disinterested in warnings about drinking and swimming than they were about waiting after eating. They tugged off their shirts, popped open fresh bottles, and made a game of who could dive into the water without spilling their drink, holding the bottles upright and high overhead as they leapt from the rocks. The girls rolled their eyes as they undressed to the swimsuits they wore beneath their clothes, watching the white churn of displaced water, only a hand holding a bottle aloft marking where each of them had broken the surface. 

The girls were far calmer in their approach, Sheri slipping one of the joints behind her ear and perching the other at the corner of her mouth, where she puffed it to life using the lighter from the front pocket of Justin’s backpack. They slid carefully into the water, swimming out to where the boys were treading water. Sheri plucked the second joint from behind her ear, lit it from the first, and handed it to Justin. 

For a while they paddled and chatted, passing the bottles and joints between them, and as the sun shifted overhead, painting the water’s surface and the droplets that clung to their skin in shades of gold, they floated quietly, looking up at the trees. 

“OK,” Sheri said, exhaling a sugar wisp of smoke, the blunt burned down to a couple of inches, pinned between her thumb and forefinger. “I’m ready to tell my story.”

Justin blinked slowly, his half-empty bottle bobbing in one hand on the surface of the water.

“But we haven’t got any pens,” he protested, the words slow and thick like molasses, and tinged with a note of confusion, as if he wasn’t quite sure why he was bringing it up. Monty lazily aimed a splash in his direction, water shifting over the back of his bruised hand as it skimmed the surface, but it was so half-hearted that the water simply lapped at the side of Justin’s face. 

“Don’t worry,” Chloe reassured him, floating on her back nearby, her eyes closed and eyelashes glittering with water droplets. “If you don’t remember the whole story, we can just say that we were experimenting with the memory theme of the assignment.”

Justin shrugged, the water rippling from the movement of his shoulders, and they lapsed into silence, waiting. 

Sheri took one more draw on the blunt, letting the smoke fill her lungs and holding it there until it began to sting, then exhaled slowly, and started her story.

~

When it reached the end, and she looked back from that vantage point, Sheri could pinpoint the moment her parents’ marriage had started to die.

It was a fight, one of what felt like thousands by that point, unnecessary and avoidable, but at the same time, somehow inevitable, because if they didn’t go to war over that particular thing on that particular day, they would have simply done it some other time, and chosen some other topic. 

That night, her parents fought about Peach. 

As much as Peach had become the sibling that Sheri had always wanted but never had, like a sister, nanny, and a best friend, who couldn’t talk to her but listened to her woes, and comforted her when she needed it, a faithful and unquestioning companion through everything, she had not been intended to fill that role. She hadn’t been expected to become a part of their family at all. 

Peach was supposed to be a source of income.

Afterwards, Sheri thought that wasn’t really what either of them had wanted.

Her mother had been looking for a way to go back to school in her forties without accruing new student loans. 

Her father had hoped for another child – or a surrogate for one, because four miscarriages had preceded Sheri, and her mother wasn’t willing to go through that again. 

Neither of them spoke to the other about their dreams. 

And Sheri supposed, with hindsight, that had always been the issue. 

In her freshman year at high school, her mother’s job was unexpectedly made redundant after more than a decade working in the same company’s finance department. The restructuring announcement came at a time when her father was still working on growing his brand new security business after striking out on his own, and they had waited through several tense weeks of consultation as the company flexed and shifted, and shook loose the faithful employees whose positions were considered surplus to the needs of its new, streamlined form. Her mother’s position had been selected in one of the final rounds, lulling her into a false sense of security as she watched the desks of her colleagues empty around her. When she had been called into the company boardroom, the news had been both expected and a total shock. 

Sheri’s parents looked for an alternative income stream while her mother applied for jobs and attended courses to update skills that had stagnated with her previous employer. The situation wasn’t dire – they made their mortgage repayments and paid their bills - but her mother’s career had been the cornerstone of her identity. It was her greatest source of independence and pride. She had been the first woman in her family to attend college, finishing her degree with honours, and the longest period she had spent out of work was the three months of maternity leave that she had taken when Sheri was born. She was not a woman content to be cared for, and the intent had been that her job would continue to support the family while Sheri’s father got his new business off the ground.

Their circumstances were tenable, but temporary. 

Sheri had never had a pet growing up, and her parents were not animal people, so when one of her father’s new clients had suggested that he might consider adding security dogs to his service offering, he had shared the idea with his wife over dinner that night mostly as a funny little story about his day. 

While he snored in the bed next to her that evening, she researched dog breeds suitable for security and protection work.

The next weekend, they drove out to Pasadena to meet with a reputable Cane Corso breeder.

It was fate, the breeder said. One of their litters was due within days, and a committed buyer had withdrawn at the last moment. The puppy was theirs, if they wanted it. 

It was a significant investment, and came with a lengthy contract, but Sheri’s parents agreed with the breeder’s terms.

If they chose to pursue security and protection dogs as an add-on service line to her father’s security business, it would be in partnership with the trainers known to and authorised by the breeder. If they showed the dog, or participated in competitions, it would be with the breeder’s approval and sponsorship. If they were interested in participating in a breeding program, it would only be with the breeder’s approval, and their vetted dams and sires. 

“We care very much for our dogs,” the breeder explained, while Sheri stood at the fence in her yard, looking across the lawn at the huge gunmetal grey dog lounging in the shade beneath a California sycamore, its cropped ears pricked to attention but its dark eyes calm and soulful. “Each family who adopts one becomes part of our family. We provide the best, and we expect the best.”

“No problem,” her father responded easily, an agreeable smile on his face. “I’d be grateful for some trainer recommendations. We read that Corso’s make great security dogs, but I wouldn’t have a clue where to start.”

Her mother complained about the list of rules on the drive home, but Sheri didn’t pay it much mind. She looked up pictures of puppies on her phone and researched dog names. They didn’t know if they would be allocated a boy or a girl, but Sheri found a name in an old news article about a police canine unit dog who had ‘written’ a report about apprehending a suspect. The dog was a boy, so she figured the name could be considered unisex, and policing seemed a similar type of work to security, insofar as dog occupations went. 

She announced to her parents that the puppy would be named Peach.

The breeder gave each dog their registered name, which they would use for showing, if they pursued that path. 

At eight-weeks-old, Calliope Cerberus, her alliterated name a reference to the breeder’s alphabetised tracking of litters, was ready to go home, and start her new life as Peach.

Having never owned a puppy, Sheri wasn’t sure whether Peach was a well-behaved one. SHer mother certainly didn’t think so, especially when she peed on the rug in the living room, lay beneath the kitchen table chewing the legs of the wooden chairs, tore apart only the left shoe from several pairs of heels and her mother’s favourite pair of slippers, and bit through the network cable plugged into her laptop while she was taking an online class. Sheri didn’t know how anyone could stay as mad as her mother did, though. Peach was perfectly sweet, with rumpled skin that looked too big for her little body, stumpy legs and oversized paws that she tripped over when she ran, and an innocent curiosity that was impossible not to find endearing.

“That dog hates me,” her mother insisted, digging through the kitchen drawer for a pair of scissors to cut open the packaging of a new network cable. “It’s always _my_ things she destroys.”

Sheri cooed at Peach, cradling her in her arms at the kitchen table while her father measured out her kibble.

“I’ve told you,” he reminded her, tone gentle and a little amused. “You have to try to think of what things look like from her level. Anything she can reach, she thinks is hers. You have to put things up where she can’t get to them.”

For a long moment, her mother stared at him as if she were imagining taking the scissors to his throat, before tossing them back into the drawer, slamming it closed, and storming back into the study. 

Sheri’s father sighed, shaking his head as he poured the kibble into Peach’s bowl. The puppy squirmed excitedly in Sheri’s arms, bursting from her hands as soon as she set her down on the ground and running to her bowl.

Peach was naturally inclined to taking instruction and excelled at puppy preschool and obedience training. Sheri went along with her father, learning each command and the associated hand action, and practiced them with Peach at home. 

“Isn’t she meant to follow _your_ commands?” her mother asked, watching Peach sit, stand and lie down in a non-repeating pattern, her eyes following Sheri’s hand signals as she gave each instruction while her father attempted to distract her with treats and toys. Her mother’s tone was sour with frustration, and Sheri bit the inside of her lip, wondering if her interview that morning had gone poorly, or if maybe she had received more rejection notifications to the applications she had been submitting. 

“She’s supposed to do what she’s told,” her father answered, his gaze locked on the dog as she followed Sheri’s hand into a sitting position. Although his tone was flat, the meaning was clear and pointed as he added. “And not be distracted.”

Her mother rolled her eyes and pushed away from the door frame, heading upstairs. 

The trainer that the breeder referred them to for protection and security training was covered in tattoos from his eye sockets to his ankles, and readily explained that he had become involved in dog training while in prison, as part of a program designed to reduce gang violence and recidivism. He had a huge Mastiff named Hulk, and invited Sheri to help him demonstrate his training. Her father looked uncertain, but by that time, Peach was too big and excitable around other dogs for Sheri to hold onto her leash, so he stood at the edge of the training area with her and watched as Hulk corralled Sheri protectively, bumping her gently with his haunches to keep himself between her and the trainer, who wore a thick protective sleeve on his arm as he circled them. Sheri squealed when the man took less than a half-step toward her and the dog lunged forward in her defence, jaws latching onto the sleeve. Afterwards, the man smiled and let her feed Hulk a treat for a job well done, the dog’s massive tongue slathering her hand in saliva. 

Peach was excitable at first, but quickly got the hang of the training, and Sheri would stand at the fence with Hulk, watching as her father walked backwards and forwards, side to side, Peach tracking every move, first with her eyes constantly on him, and then with her attention upon the trainer, who seemed to appear to her to be a different person when dressed in protective gear. Peach learned to manoeuvre both from her father’s side and from between his legs, follow voice commands and silent signals, and the trainer even took time to show Sheri how to walk Peach with calm control, instead of being dragged along behind her. 

“So, when will she be ready?” her mother asked one night at dinner, nodding down at where Peach was lying attentively by Sheri’s chair, drool hanging in wet strings from her cheeks as she stared up at Sheri’s pork chops. Her father reached for his beer.

“Ready for what?” he asked. 

It was the calmest exchange Sheri could remember between them for weeks, the words spoken plainly and without any sharp edges or hidden meanings obscured underneath. 

“To sell,” her mother said, as if she were reminding him of something he had forgotten. 

“What?” Sheri yelped, and Peach’s ears pricked, attentive to her distress as Sheri looked between her parents, eyes wide with surprise and horror. “You’re going to sell Peach?”

Her mother shrugged, looking at her father. 

“That was the whole idea, wasn’t it? Train the dog for protection and security, sell it to buy the next pup, and start again?”

She said it so plainly, like they had all known this all along, and Sheri felt betrayal like a knife thrust between her ribs, so sudden and searing that she didn’t even register that her mother had referred to Peach as ‘it’. Her eyes filled with tears and she clenched her quivering jaw. Her father held up a hand, his expression serious. 

“I don’t plan on selling Peach,” her father said, his tone firm and voice clear. Her mother stared across the table at him, the wine glass raised halfway to her lips sinking back to the tabletop in disbelief as he explained, “I’ve been talking to Hector about a referral fee for customers who see what Peach can do and want to train their own dogs-“

“A referral fee?” her mother’s voice turned sharp as she cut across him. “Protection dogs are worth between five and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Peach is worth more than any amount of money,” Sheri insisted, swiping furiously at her cheeks as tears spilled past her lashes. “You’re _not_ selling her.”

Her father cast her a gentle, reassuring look, reaching for her hand.

“Sweetheart-“

“Sheri,” her mother spoke firmly, her expression hard as she spoke. “The food you’re eating doesn’t just appear. This house belongs to the bank. Your school books and clothes and phone all cost money.” She indicated the kitchen around them, the refrigerator that would need to be replaced in the next twelve months, the dishwasher that only worked on one program any more. She raised her eyebrows earnestly. “The kind of money that dogs like this sell for would make a huge contribution to your college fund.”

Sheri shot her an icy look.

“ _Your_ college fund, you mean?”

Rather than respond to the accusation, her mother’s eyes turned in her father’s direction, dark and frosty. 

“I told you not to take her to training with you,” she said, shaking her head as she brought her wine glass to her lips again, her spare hand waving in Peach’s direction, where the dog peered at her over the edge of the table from beside Sheri’s chair. “I told you she would get attached to it-“

Sheri stood so quickly that her chair rocked back on its hind legs, teetering there for a moment before righting itself, and Peach stood immediately to attention at her side, bristling and ready.

“Peach is not an _it_ ,” she said, her voice trembling as her parents looked up at her from either side of the table. “And she’s not for sale.”

Sheri moved on trembling knees to leave the table, but turned back, snatching the pork chops from her plate before storming from the room, Peach glued protectively to her side. She shoved open the rear screen door to the porch, holding it open for Peach to pass through, and then pulled it closed behind them with a resounding crack. As she sat down on the porch step in the dark and Peach alternated between chewing on the pork chops that Sheri offered and licking away the tears that streaked her face, her parents waged war in the kitchen. 

“We agreed!” her mother insisted, her volume increasing as her tone grew more shrill. “That money was supposed to pay for me to start studying for my CPA!”

“You don’t think I know that?” her father shouted back, exhausted and incredulous. “What are you proposing, that I take our daughter’s dog from her so that you can feel better about yourself?” The question was full of scorn, but he seemed to regret it almost immediately, his voice quieter and softer as he rationalised, “You have your job at the legal firm now. We can look at loan options-”

Her mother scoffed, her voice full of scorn and recrimination.

“You know we can’t afford any more debt,” she said, her volume barely below a shout. “And yes, I have a job now.” Her tone dripped with disdain. “As an Admin Assistant. Which I only got because Lainie Jensen felt sorry for me and put in a good word, and I probably make their diversity statistics look marginally less pathetic.” Her voice titled steeply toward a desperate shriek. “I’m forty-one! I should be at the peak of my career! Not the pity hire!”

Sheri didn’t hear her father’s response. One of them thought to shut the kitchen door, and all that was audible for the remaining forty minutes that they spent battling back and forth was the dull, wordless roar of their voices. Sheri stared up at the night sky, watching the stars through the canopy of the hackberry trees that lined the yard, while Peach sat next to her, her breath hot on Sheri’s face and scented lightly with pork, her body pressed protectively to Sheri’s side. Her tears had long since dried, her hurt sinking low in her chest and settling into a muted ache, by the time the screen door opened behind her.

She felt the pre-emptive rumble of a growl in Peach’s chest, but it faded unvoiced, and Sheri knew without looking that it was her father.

“You alright, sweetheart?” her father asked, and when she glanced back at him, she saw that he was offering a popsicle from the freezer. 

When she was small, and she refused to eat her peas, sitting stubbornly long after they had gone cold on her plate because her mother wouldn’t let her leave the table if she didn’t finish her dinner, her father would always be the first to give in. The rule had been that she wasn’t allowed any dessert if she didn’t clear her plate, but he often snuck her a popsicle, nodding for her to tuck it behind her back as he made a show of sending her upstairs to her room while her mother perched on the couch, arms folded angrily. 

“If she sells Peach, she’s going to have to make it a package deal,” Sheri said, the paper packaging of the popsicle crackling beneath her hand as she grasped it. “Because she’s not going anywhere without me.”

Her father smiled ruefully in the dark, and eased himself onto the porch swing.

“That won’t be necessary,” he assured her, tearing open his own popsicle. “We came to a compromise.”

Sheri removed the paper wrapping and offered Peach the first lick of her raspberry popsicle. 

“Does the compromise include her spending the weekend at the Holiday Inn?” she asked flatly.

Her father sighed, resting his elbows on his knees, his popsicle hanging from one hand. 

“She’ll be back when she’s ready,” he said, and Sheri thought that it was meant to sound reassuring, but mostly, he just sounded tired and sad. 

“I don’t care if she never comes back,” she muttered bitterly, and Peach leaned past the popsicle to swipe a sticky raspberry lick across her cheek.

“You don’t mean that,” her father said. He leaned back on the porch seat and rocked himself gently, nibbling on his popsicle. His expression was sombre and drawn, his eyes distant with deep thought. 

Sheri exhaled softly. 

“I wish I did,” she said. 

~

Monty wrote about the argument. In his version of the story, it became a gritty standoff framed in the tradition of _the good, the bad and the ugly_ , but once all of the shots had been fired, and the smoke and dust cleared, there were no winners, only the defeated and the wounded. 

Chloe wrote about the quiet moment of support between Peach, Sheri, and her father. She described the warm, starless night that stretched over the porch, the burden of emotion lightened when shared between them, and the memory of the fight fading as the sun rose the next morning, bringing with it a new day. 

Only Justin knew the end of the story. 

He knew that the compromise Sheri’s parents had reached was emailing the owner of a papered Cane Corso who had contacted them months earlier to explain that he had fallen out with the breeder Peach had been purchased from, and was looking for other owners willing to consider a private arrangement to breed their dogs. They would split the sales profits fifty-fifty. 

He knew that the consulting veterinarian who confirmed Peach’s pregnancy recognised the breeder’s distinctive naming convention when he saw her registration, and contacted them about the expected litter of eight puppies. 

He knew that the breeder had threatened to sue for breach of contract, and demanded ownership and sale rights. A lawyer at the firm where Sheri’s mother worked agreed to represent her parents at a discounted rate, but advised that their chances of successfully defending the claim were slim. 

He knew that, when she went into labour Peach suffered dystocia, which had become clear when more than two hours had passed after only one of the eight she was carrying had been birthed, and that the subsequent rush to the emergency veterinary clinic had resulted in a Caesarean section that had been too late to rescue the remaining litter. 

He knew that, in the weeks following, Peach doted on the single pup, grooming and feeding it, but sometimes, she would search the whelping box, as if looking for the rest of her babies. 

He knew that, when they found out what happened, the breeder had dropped their suit. They never heard from the owner of the sire again. 

He knew that, afterwards, Sheri’s father had made an appointment and had Peach spayed. It had caused another argument, and while her parents raged at one another downstairs, Sheri curled up beside Peach on her bed, the dog’s eyes still clouded and drowsy from the anaesthesia, and told her it would be OK.

Justin wrote about the solitary, fortunate pup, a boy that Sheri named Lucky, and the home that he had been adopted into, with a married couple and their son, where he was loved, wanted, and happy. 

That night, after writing out her version of the story at her desk, Chloe turned out the light and climbed into bed. A little sunburned and her hair still damp, she rolled over toward the window, looking out at the fence on the far side of the dark backyard, and decided on the story she would tell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you as always to [ closetfascination ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetfascination/pseuds/closetfascination) for the beta reading, encouragement and chats. If you're not already, you should check out her fics, especially [ Wake Up ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29346840/chapters/72084132), a canon-divergent reimagining starting at the end of S3. 
> 
> Next up is another set of mini-scenes, and then on to Chloe's story.
> 
> Thank you for reading and commenting x


	14. Respite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next set of mini-scenes, featuring:
> 
> \- Sheri and Justin, and how boysenberry came to be Justin's favourite ice cream flavour  
> \- Justin and Chloe, in the aftermath of the college interviews episode (s4)  
> \- Monty and Justin, and Jillian the Jeep

When Sheri insisted on doing something to celebrate the A- Justin scored on his paper on _the Outsiders_ , he was reluctant, but Sheri was relentless and cunning, and knew the quickest path to assured victory. 

She suggested they go out for ice cream. 

“OK,” Justin agreed, after a long beat of silence, holding up his finger in pause when she beamed at him triumphantly. “But we have to go to that place over on the corner of Juniper and Hawthorne.” He smiled when she raised her eyebrows curiously, explaining, “I went there with Zach this one time, and they have like, thirty fucking flavours, and this policy that they have to let you try as many flavours as you ask for.”

“Done,” Sheri shrugged, nodding her agreement. 

They set out the following weekend, Sheri picking him up from the basketball courts a few blocks from the estate where Bryce and Zach lived, and drove over to the next town. The sun was shining brightly, but the air still carried a crisp autumn chill, and when they pulled up outside of the store, they were able to park right out front, they and walked straight in to no line. In fact, aside from a girl dressed in a pink and blue uniform, tapping at her phone screen behind the counter, the store was empty. 

Justin rolled up the sleeves of his Liberty Tigers hoodie and rubbed his hands together, peering into the display case. 

“Can I get you anything?” the girl trilled, tucking her phone into the pocket of her apron and beaming at Sheri, who couldn’t help but smile as she watched Justin bend at the waist to consult the flavour markers of each tub.

“Oh, we’re here for him,” Sheri told the girl, nodding in Justin’s direction. “Whatever he wants, it’s on me.”

The girl nodded, redirecting her bubbly expression to Justin as he straightened, selection made.

“Could I please try the _Mango Tango_?” he asked, all perfect manners and bright smiles. When the girl opened the back of the display case to retrieve a tiny, sample-sized scoop, he clicked his tongue. “While you’re there, I’ll try the _Caramel Praline Cheesecake_ , too.” He offered a megawatt grin. “Please.”

“Sure,” the girl chirped, reaching up to retrieve another miniature tasting spoon.

Sheri settled in at a table by the window to watch and wait. 

“Hmmm,” Justin nodded enthusiastically as he tried the first sample, and then the second. “So good.” With a flick of his hand, he tossed the pair of tiny wooden spoons into the waste paper basket at the base of the display case. “Now, could I try the _Cotton Candy_ , the _Strawberry Cheesecake_ …” He trailed off as he prowled along the length of the display. “Oh, and the _Butter Pecan_.”

The girl blinked, her expression flickering just slightly, and nodded slowly.

“OK,” she said, reaching for another handful of sample spoons. “Sure.”

Sheri tried unsuccessfully to smother an amused smile, propped her chin in her hand, and watched. 

It took Justin almost twenty-five minutes to try all but a handful of flavours, the bottom of the waste paper basket littered with sample spoons and the smile of the girl behind the counter hanging by a thread by the time that he turned to Sheri and shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “I just can’t decide.” The corners of his mouth quirked upwards at Sheri’s raised eyebrow, and he lifted his chin in a curious nod. “What’s your favourite?”

Sheri pursed her lips.

“My go-to is always boysenberry,” she said, and Justin turned a thoughtful look toward the display case. The girl reached tiredly for another sample spoon, predicting his request, but Justin waved a hand.

“We’ll have a three-scoop sundae, all boysenberry, please,” he said, and when the girl couldn’t quite hold back the blank, shell-shocked stare, as if to ask _seriously?_ after all the flavours he had sampled, he switched on a bright, dimpled, famous Foley smile. “Thank you so much.”

The blush had faded from the poor girl’s cheeks by the time she brought the sundae to their table, and Sheri handed her a folded bill from her purse, telling her to keep the change. The scoops were generous and topped with whipped cream, slivered almonds and a bright candied cherry. They took a spoon each from the cutlery holder at the end of the table, and Justin nudged the cherry from the top, sending it rolling down to Sheri’s side of the sundae bowl. 

“Thanks for this,” he murmured, toying with his spoon as Sheri popped the cherry in her mouth. When she only shrugged, smiling kindly, he scooped a spoonful of ice cream and popped it in his mouth. After a moment, he frowned, as if puzzled, and spoke around the mouthful of half-melted ice cream, exclaiming with surprise, “This is fucking amazing.”

Sheri smirked, tugging the cherry stem from between her lips and setting it aside on a napkin.

“Better than all those other flavours you tried?” she asked, a musical note of amusement in her voice.

“Definitely,” he confirmed, nodding seriously as he scooped another spoonful. “Yeah.”

They laughed and chatted over the sundae in the deserted ice cream parlour, while the girl behind the counter returned her attention to her phone, no doubt texting her friends about the annoying boy with the cute smile who had asked to try every flavour in the store, and once the bowl was empty, Justin devouring most of the ice cream and Sheri happily allowing him to, he grinned at her across the table.

“Look,” he said, sucking clean his spoon and then buffing it dry on the sleeve of his sweater. “I’ll show you a trick Zach taught me.”

Sheri watched, eyebrows raised, as Justin huffed a few breaths onto the concave surface of the spoon, and then attempted to balance it on the tip of his nose. 

When it dropped to the surface of the table with a clatter, Sheri giggled, but Justin only grinned, and tried again. 

~

Normally he ran with Lainie.

But that morning, the morning after his college interview with the recruiter from Occidental, the morning after finding out that his mother, his _real_ mother, who he had abandoned to live a carefree life where everything was easy and safe, had overdosed in the same kind of dirty, shitty place she had lived in her whole life, Justin ran alone. 

It wasn’t only because he felt ashamed for his outburst the night before. Matt and Lainie had been trying their best to be understanding and empathetic, to relate to how he was feeling and offer support and closure, and Justin regretted it had been _that_ , the way Lainie looked at him with tears in her eyes, hurting because _he_ hurt, the way Matt had tipped his head sympathetically, his voice gentle and reassuring, was what had torn the seal on his anger and ripped it open like a wound.

He wasn’t even angry at them.

And he knew they knew that, and somehow, that made it _worse_. 

But that wasn’t why he left early, slipping into a pair of basketball shorts and a hooded sweater, stepping into his sneakers in the dark while Clay tossed and turned and muttered in his bed on the opposite side of the outhouse. 

It was because Clay had been right, when Justin came home late the night before, and that easy, faithful lie about being at Jessica’s had rolled off his tongue. Clay had seen straight through it, because it didn’t make one fucking bit of sense, in the context of their break-up and the fact that Jessica hated his guts. He had asked immediately if Justin was using again. 

Like the fucking coward he was, Justin had locked himself in the bathroom until he was sure that Clay had gone to sleep – or whatever it was that Clay did these days that passed for sleep, the other boy’s mind conjuring up new ways to torture him with memories while he twisted in sweat-soaked sheets – sitting on the lid of the toilet by the open window, and inhaling acrid smoke from a twist of foil until his body sagged against the wall, and he slipped away far enough that he was only distantly aware of the searing pain of loss in his chest. 

When he woke there, slouched against the wall with the burned foil drooping from one hand and his neck aching, Justin got up, flushed the evidence, changed his clothes, and ran. 

He knew it was the cowardly thing to do. He knew he should march right up the back stairs into the house and tell Matt and Lainie that he had relapsed. He knew he should shake Clay awake from whatever nightmare held him in its clutches and tell him what he had done. 

But they would want to get him help. And he didn’t want help. He didn’t want to stop. 

He didn’t want to get better. 

He didn’t want to hurt, but at the same time, it was all he wanted. 

Only one person had ever understood that about him. 

So, Justin ran. 

The sun was cresting over the hill as he reached the gates, but the air was still chill enough to hurt on each inhale – or maybe that was just his blackened junkie lungs protesting the exercise as he slowed to a clipped walk, trotting up the stairs and along the grass-lined path toward the carved stone mausoleum. In the low light of early morning, the brilliant purple and yellow of the peonies, irises and daylilies that ringed the family plot were washed out to ashen shades, and Justin thought that was sort of appropriate.

Amongst the carved stones, a splash of pink caught his eye, and Justin hesitated, but not before she heard him and turned around. 

“Uh, I-“ he licked his lower lip anxiously, coming to a stop at the mouth of the ring of greenery and rocking on the balls of his feet. “I wasn’t expecting anyone to be here.”

Chloe tipped her head apologetically, her hands tucked into the warmth of the pockets at the front of her marshmallow pink puffer jacket. 

“Sorry, I can go, if-“

Justin shook his head, stepping forward quickly, his words and breath stuttering over one another as his body reminded him that the high of last night was only a memory now, one his brain could no longer offer him naturally, his serotonin receptors poisoned and black. 

“No,” he said, and swallowed awkwardly. “No, I–“ he cleared his throat, scratched at the underside of his jaw, and wondered if she could see the way he was ticking, if she would recognise what it was, if she did. “I’m actually, uh, not really sure I want to be alone.”

Chloe only nodded, her expression unreadable but soft-edged, and turned back to the headstone. Chewing the inside of his lower lip, Justin moved to her side. She stood so still and calm, he felt like he was itching in his own skin beside her, his fingers scratching at his nailbeds where his hands were jammed inside his sweater pockets. It was too quiet here, and as always, his old friend had nothing to offer him but regret.

It had been scrubbed away, either by the cemetery staff or a family member, but the marker-pen outline of _RAPIST_ was still visible as the sunlight hit the polished stone face of the gravestone, graffitied in a slanting scrawl across Bryce’s name. 

Justin couldn’t remember why he had come here. 

“I didn’t see you at the funeral,” he commented, mostly to distract himself from grinding his teeth, and when her gaze slid in his direction, he shook his head quickly. “I didn’t – I mean – I understand, why you wouldn’t go.” He returned his gaze to the grave. “Have you come out here, much?”

Chloe shook her head.

“Not really,” she answered, her voice quiet and steady. “I’ve been once or twice, when I have something I want to tell him.”

Justin thought it would have been understandable if the only thing Chloe ever wanted to tell Bryce was _fuck you_.

Chloe wasn’t looking at him, but she seemed to understand. 

“I don’t really… have a place… other than here,” she explained haltingly, pausing to press her lips together, and Justin remembered with a sudden sting researching in the days following Monty’s death what happened to unclaimed remains. Chloe glanced at him and smiled tightly, pressing back the sadness from her expression. “And I feel like he’d still be happy for me. Even if he’s not the first person I wish I could tell.”

Justin blinked at the grave, his stomach twisting with guilt as he thought about how derisively he had dismissed the idea of a funeral, even a burial, for his mother. He wasn’t ready to think about her as _gone_ , the concept wouldn’t even form in his head just yet, despite how long and how frequently she had been absent from his life, but maybe one day, when it did, he would like to have a place to come where he could visit her, and know that she was safe and resting, after everything. 

“What do you tell him?” he asked quietly.

Chloe smiled, this time warm and bright. 

“Today I told him that I got into the University of San Diego,” she said, shrugging her shoulders a little bashfully when he glanced at her. “Early admissions.”

“Congrats,” Justin said, and he meant it, even as his throat tightened at the thought of his ruined admissions interview. Chloe nodded gratefully, tilting her chin in the direction of the gravestone. 

“What did you come to tell him?”

Justin dug his hands deeper into his pockets and pursed his lips, the bridge of his nose wrinkling with a frown. He heard himself say the words, but they seemed faraway, and the voice didn’t sound like his. 

“That my mom died yesterday.”

Chloe turned her head toward him, her expression stunned and heartbroken. 

“Oh, Justin,” she murmured, shaking her head. “I’m so sorry.” Chloe offered him a soft, understanding look. “Do your friends know? Clay, or Zach?”

Justin shrugged his shoulders. 

“Nah,” he muttered, and he knew he was doing exactly what he had done with Lainie and Matt the night before, trying to make his hurt appear small to obscure the fact that it was so immeasurably vast that he felt as if he would be crushed beneath it, but he couldn’t manage to shake the artificial casual tone from his voice. “They’ve got their own shit going on,” he cleared his throat, tugging his hand from his pocket to swipe at the end of his nose with the sleeve of his sweater. “I didn’t want to…”

The words died there, choked into silence. He didn’t have anything left. He let his hand fall to his side, and stared at his best friend’s grave, numb. 

Chloe didn’t say anything. She didn’t ask if he was OK, or if there was anything she could do. She turned her gaze back to the headstone, and very gently, reached out to take his hand in hers. 

They stood together at Bryce’s grave, quiet as the sun crested over the hill. 

~

The parking lot behind the old hardware store was entirely empty aside from a few hopeful weeds sprouting up through cracks in the asphalt and a lone shopping cart, tipped on its side and missing a wheel. Heat rose in waves from the sun-bleached bitumen, and the sky lay flat above them, a cloudless, featureless blue. The store had long since closed and been left to sit with barren shelves and abandoned aisles, its windows scrawled with half-assed graffiti. Although the sheriff’s department made a valiant effort to deter them, kids would climb the maintenance ladder on the far side of the building up to the flat roof which, since the store had been closed, had become crowded with fold-out chairs and abandoned coolers, empty bottles, cans and jerry-rigged bongs. 

Chloe had been up there a handful of times, but always under cover of dark, and anyway, at this stage of summer, the California sun a bright disc burning high overhead, it had to be at least ten degrees hotter up on that roof than it was sitting in the Jeep at the entrance to the abandoned parking lot. 

There was no one around, and nothing to hit, but she buckled her seatbelt tightly, anyway. 

“OK, Jillian,” Chloe said resolutely, looking through the windshield at the empty expanse of the parking lot with determination. “Let’s do this.”

Monty frowned at her from the passenger seat.

“Who the fuck is Jillian?”

Chloe smiled, patting the steering wheel firmly and affectionately with one hand as she reached to turn the key in the ignition with the other, the engine rumbling to life beneath the hood. The air-conditioning was hit and miss, so they had rolled both windows down before they swapped seats. She would have liked to have worked on her tan, but convincing Monty to remove the canopy was a work in progress, especially considering that last time she had needled him into it, a summer shower had come through overnight, and he’d been left trying to reattach it in the dark and rain while she slept soundly, lulled by the steady drumbeat patter of raindrops on her window. 

“You know,” she said over the quiet grumble of the engine, lifting her shoulders in a shrug. “Jillian the Jeep.”

Monty blinked.

“No,” he said, closing his hand over hers to still its motion when she reached to disengage the emergency brake. Chloe raised her eyebrows at him, and he shook his head, repeating, “ _No_. My car isn’t called Jillian.”

Chloe shrugged carelessly, thumbing the button to release the emergency brake. 

“OK, so what’s she called?”

She dropped the E-brake, Monty’s grip over her hand resisting only lightly.

“It’s not called anything. It’s a fucking car.”

Chloe’s brow furrowed with a frown, although there was a hint of amusement gleaming in her eyes when she slid a glance in his direction.

“That’s a rude thing to say in front of Jillian.”

Monty huffed a breath through his nose, removed his hand from the emergency brake, and slouched back into the passenger seat. 

“Just try not to jump straight from neutral to third this time, OK?”

Chloe rolled her eyes, but shrugged good-naturedly.

“Sometimes Jillian and I just don’t agree on these things.”

Monty set his jaw, folded his arms across his chest, and sank deeper into his seat, refusing to rise to her teasing. Smiling to herself, Chloe focussed her attention on the clutch, managing to shift into first gear but not without a shuddering jolt that rocked them both forward in their seats. As far as first attempts went, it wasn’t her worst. This was the fourteenth afternoon they had spent out here, and her initial effort to put the car into gear each session had ranged from scarcely passable to disastrous, that one time when she had managed to bump the gearstick directly into reverse and then anxiously hit the gas harder than she had intended, sending them backwards so quickly and unexpectedly that she had let go of the steering wheel with a frightened squeal and Monty had barely recovered from his own surprise in time to grab it with one hand and yank up the emergency brake with the other before the car had stalled. 

They had called it quits early that day. 

Chloe slid a glance in Monty’s direction, biting the corner of her lip as the car shuddered, barely holding enough revs to keep the engine running, and he rolled his eyes, unfolding his arms to sit forward a little and peer past her hand on the steering wheel at the dials in the dashboard. 

“It’s fine,” he reassured her, lifting his chin in a nod. “Just give it a little more gas-“ the Jeep lurched again as Chloe pressed her foot anxiously against the peddle and Monty cleared his throat, clarifying, “-not that much-“ and then he sighed, as she eased off completely, and the car shuddered and stalled, “-but more than that.” 

Chloe flopped forwards, resting her forehead on the back of her hands on the steering wheel.

“I’m never going to get it,” she muttered, her shoulders slumped with defeat. “I’m going to have to date some rich jerk with a sports car just to get around.”

Monty scoffed, shaking his head, and propped his elbow on the door frame.

“What a tragedy,” he lamented sarcastically, only raising an eyebrow when Chloe cast him a look over her shoulder, eyes narrowed and lower lip pouted. He waved a hand toward the ignition. “Put it back in park, start it up, and let’s do it again.”

Chloe sighed, sitting back in her seat. She turned the key to the off position, and pulled the hand brake back into place, and stared out through the windshield at the broken, partially boarded windows of the old hardware store.

“What’s even the point?” she sighed dejectedly. “We’ve been doing this for weeks, and I’m not getting any better.” Absently, she ran her fingertips over the edge of the dash, as if petting an animal. “And all this starting and stalling is probably hurting Jillian.”

Monty pressed his lips together into a thin line and took a slow, shallow breath. 

“How about this?“ he suggested, drawing her attention. “If you can make it across the lot today without stalling-“ he paused, as if uncertain, and Chloe raised her eyebrows, waiting. “-we can take the canopy off.”

Chloe yelped with excitement, bouncing in the driver’s seat, and nodded her agreement eagerly. Monty set his jaw, trying not to give in as she beamed at him, then turned back to the steering wheel, her jubilation seesawing with renewed focus. 

“Hear that, Jillian?” Chloe asked, turning the keys in the ignition once more. “We just gotta do one good run, and then it’s an afternoon of topless sunbathing for you.” 

In the passenger seat, Monty covered his face with both hands and groaned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you as always to [ closetfascination ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetfascination/pseuds/closetfascination) for the beta reading, encouragement and chats. If you're not already, you should check out her fics, especially [ Wake Up ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29346840/chapters/72084132), a canon-divergent reimagining starting at the end of S3. 
> 
> Next up is Chloe's chapter, and her contribution to the family story group project.
> 
> Thank you for reading and commenting x


	15. Chloe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chloe shares her family story.

**August 2017**

Normally, Chloe knew better than to let Justin pack cones for her, but that afternoon, she allowed herself just a little bit of wilful forgetfulness when she sat down at the opposite end of the couch in the pool house and Justin passed her the bong, clearwater blue eyes half-hooded and his gaze on the television screen.

She leaned forward to retrieve the cigarette lighter from the coffee table, flicked it with unsteady fingers three times before the flame caught and held, and just as the logical part of her began to wrest back control, made an attempt to loosen her grip, to lower the mouth of the bong from her lips, hissing insistently at the back of her mind that she should flick at least _half_ of the weed he had thumb-packed tightly into the cone piece back into the bowl, the bud caught and singed and curled as it burned, and the neck filled with thick coils of smoke, and she inhaled, sliding her thumb off of the carb so that it filled her lungs, all at once. 

She felt proud and stupid when she exhaled without coughing, and offered the bong back to Justin.

“Want another one?” he asked, his voice low and languid and scented with sticky smoke and candy from the bag of gummy bears balanced on the arm of the couch. Without waiting for an answer, he reached for the bowl and began to pack another cone with generous and practiced hands.

“Dude,” Scott said from the floor, where he sat about two feet back from the television screen, eyes bloodshot and pupils blown, but his gaze pinned to the game of _Mario Kart_. “You trying to kill her or something?”

Justin glanced at Chloe, pouted apologetically, and lifted his shoulder in a shrug. 

“Oh,” he said, looking down at the already half-packed cone piece. “Sorry.”

Chloe shook her head, sinking into the couch cushions, and handed him the cigarette lighter.

“I’m OK,” she said, as she felt the echo of each breath in her chest, the vibration of each exhale passing between her lips, and her thoughts began to circle one another like a carousel. “But no, thank you.” Justin’s fingers were warm and calloused when they brushed hers as he accepted the lighter back. “I’ll have some gummy bears, though.”

Justin handed her the packet. On the floor in front of them, Scott leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his avatar chasing the ghost of his previous game, and losing. Chloe popped a blue gummy bear between her lips, tipped her head back, and tongued it against the roof of her mouth.

She should have stayed outside and helped Sheri negotiate Monty out of the pool. 

She should have texted before Sheri came to pick her up on her way to Bryce’s cook-out to say she wasn’t feeling well, and maybe she could swap places with Justin, and tell her story next week. 

She should have swapped groups with Zach - even though it was against the rules - because family trees might be boring as fuck, and probably by now she would be ready to wrap her fingers around Courtney’s throat, if the questions she had overheard her pestering Mrs Bradley with earlier in the week about options for oral presentations of their projects to the class were any indication, but it would be better than _this_.

 _This_ was a dumb idea.

And it was her fault. 

All of it. 

“Scott,” Sheri said, in that way that she had, that sounded sweet and polite but also kind of meant _I’m not asking, I’m telling you_ , when she appeared in the doorway of the pool house. “Could you please go fill in? Bryce needs a volleyball partner.”

She smiled as she pulled Monty over the threshold by his elbow and dressed only in boardshorts, which dripped chlorinated water everywhere. Scott looked up at both of them, then back at Justin and Chloe on the couch, and set down the game controller. As he got up from the floor, the ghost of his best game blasted over the finish line, leaving his avatar behind, wheels sparking as its kart ground along a barrier. 

There was a minor scuffle in the doorway when Monty waited until the exact moment Scott was passing by to shake his hair out like a wet dog, spraying both Scott and Sheri with water, but Sheri managed to push Scott outside before he secured a proper headlock around Monty’s neck, and pulled the door closed behind him. Monty rolled his eyes at the eyebrow Sheri raised at him, his damp hair flicking out from his scalp in every which way, and flopped into one of the armchairs like a reprimanded child. On the other side of the door, muffled by the glass and expensive, custom-made shutters, Luke and Diego protested loudly when Scott cannonballed into the pool to join the opposite team. 

Sheri took one of the beach towels draped over the back of the couch and held it out to Monty.

“At least put a towel down,” she said, looking pointedly at his soaking wet boardshorts. 

“Brycey doesn’t care,” Monty muttered, but took the towel anyway, standing only for a long as it took to messily toss it over the already damp fabric of the armchair before throwing himself back down onto it. If the bruises that laddered up his flank from his hip bothered him at all, it didn’t show in his expression. 

“Maybe not,” Sheri granted, taking another towel from where it had been abandoned on one of the bar stools and folding it neatly on the seat of the remaining armchair before sitting down. “But it’s impolite.” 

As if her comment had reminded him of his manners, Justin jerked his thumb in the direction of the bag of gummy bears, which lay in Chloe’s lap.

“You guys want any?”

Sheri waved a hand to decline, reaching for one of the unopened bottles of water on the coffee table. Monty shook his head wordlessly, pointing instead at the bong in Justin’s opposite hand, which he handed over, along with the cigarette lighter. Watching from beneath her eyelashes as Monty leaned forward to take the pre-packed hit, the flame reflecting on his dark eyes in the low light of the pool house, Chloe thought, in concentric circles, about suggesting that Sheri let Justin pack her a hit, too. 

Maybe if they were all fucked up, this would be easier. 

As Monty tipped his head back, blowing smoke in a steady stream toward the ceiling, the back of the hand he wrapped loosely around the neck of the bong faded since the week before from blackcurrant to brown-edged-green, Chloe realised the irony.

They were all fucked up. And it didn’t make it any easier. 

In fact, that was the hard part. 

Monty offered the bong to Sheri, and when she shook her head, sat forward to place it on the coffee table, his voice scratchy with residual smoke. 

“Whose turn is it, anyway?” he asked carelessly, slouching back into the armchair and tipping his head against his shoulder, amber-brown eyes dulled with smoke and disinterest. 

Sheri took a sip of water and then twisted the cap back onto the bottle.

“Chloe was going to go second,” she said, looking past Justin, who was staring at the endless loop of celebrating cartoon characters on the television screen, Yoshi and Toad and Bowser zipping past one another and shaking their fists in the air in technicolour glee. A tiny line creased her forehead between her brows as Sheri frowned at the other girl. “You still want to do it?”

Chloe hesitated, her throat tight and the gummy bear dissolving on her tongue gluing it to the roof of her mouth. Somewhere down underneath the echo of her exhales and the leapfrog pattern of her thoughts, a burst of anxiety ground across her nerve endings, and her hands, resting on the couch cushions at her sides, couldn’t seem to find one another, but her fingers tightened reflexively, her fingernails biting into her palms, the sting dull and distant. She felt her lips part, as if to respond, but couldn’t find the words to shake them free. 

Monty sat up a little straighter, his teeth sinking into the inside of his lower lip.

“I can do it,” he said, and Justin and Sheri both glanced at him, surprised. He shrugged awkwardly, then glanced down at the bong, and broke into a slow grin. “I mean, I might need Justy to pack me another cone or two first.” He chuckled at the elaborate hand gesture that Justin offered, like some kind of fancy weed sommelier, then looked back to Chloe. “But I can go next, if you’re not ready.”

It was the kind of instinctive protection he had been offering since they had been six years old. 

Chloe swallowed the sugar residue coating her tongue, forced herself to uncurl her fingers, and sat up. Monty’s slouch was all uncaring disregard, but she could see the concern tight at the corners of Monty’s eyes. It felt like she was reaching for the memory underwater as she thought of sitting on his bed, his injured hand clasped over the patchwork scar on his leg, and the flippant way he had brushed off her concern about how he would choose a story to tell. It was exactly the way that he sat now, a picture of casual indifference, wearing his bruises like they belonged there, and offering her a way out. 

To busy her unsteady hands, and give herself a moment to gather her resolve, Chloe retrieved the bag of gummy bears from her lap and leaned forward to set it on the coffee table.

This had been her idea. 

And as much as it terrified her – the story she had chosen – she _wanted_ to share it. 

“No,” Chloe reassured them, drawing her feet up to sit cross-legged at the end of the couch and setting her hands resolutely on her knees. “I’m ready.”

~

For a long time, the last memory Chloe had of seeing her father was two nights before her mother strapped her into the back of her SUV, and they left him.

Her parents were in the kitchen, and from the dark of the hallway, where she peered around the edge of her bedroom doorframe, she couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she could see her mother. Her blonde hair was perfectly styled and her face made up, but she was still dressed in the tights she had worn to yoga first thing that morning, and her expression was tight and tired as she looked down at a book of bright, multicoloured sticky tabs, held loosely between her hands. Chloe recalled the ballet-slipper pink shade of her mother’s fingernails, freshly manicured a day or two earlier in her favourite shade, but she couldn’t remember, later, if she was still wearing her wedding rings. 

It was the last time her mother had her nails done until the day of her second marriage. 

Over the days that followed, her mother stopped styling her hair, tugging it back into a tail or a topknot to keep it out of her eyes while she packed their belongings, and then drove them away to their new life, days and days of motels with tiny showers and even tinier bottles of complimentary combination shampoo and conditioner. She stopped wearing makeup, too, her focus shifting from disguising crows’ feet and sunspots to managing their rapidly dwindling financial resources, coordinating with the divorce lawyers, and securing them a safe place to live. 

When they arrived in Evergreen and she started working for the real estate agency, her mother unpacked her hairdryer and her makeup bag, but it was never quite the same. Chloe always thought her mother was beautiful. She had been a small-town teenage beauty pageant contestant. Although she had never quite managed to place, the dresses that she bought second-hand from the consignment store and altered on the little sewing machine in her bedroom in the trailer she shared with her father unable to compete with the custom-tailored gowns of the girls from wealthier families, there was a charm and sweetness about her that drew people, and Chloe grew up in awe of it. She loved to stand beside her mother at the bathroom mirror, watching her select pots and palettes and brushes from her makeup bag, applying each one with a practiced hand.

After they moved to Evergreen, her mother’s hands were a little less steady, and when her makeup ran out, she replaced it with drug store alternatives. Even so, Chloe still thought she was as beautiful as that last night, standing in the kitchen with her father, painstakingly put together with all of the beauty treatments and exercise regimens and cosmetic mastery that money could buy. 

While Chloe could remember her mother vividly from that night, the stone-grey shade of her yoga tights, the small white gold hoop earrings her father had bought her the previous Valentine’s day which she later sold to pay their heating bill, the way that her mother’s shoulders had sunk with defeat as she placed the book of coloured tags on the stone countertop and wrapped her arms around herself, an attempt to simulate the comfort she could no longer expect from anyone else in her life, Chloe’s memory of her father from that night faded over time to a handful of impressions.

She remembered his hair, such a dark shade of brown that it was almost black, grey smudging the temples where it was growing through since he had last had it dyed. She remembered his tie, navy silk with a pattern picked out in a paler shade of thread, slipped off and laying in a crumpled pile on the countertop, still knotted in a loop like a noose, the collar of his shirt turned up where he had pulled it off. She remembered the distance between him and her mother, a matter of feet, but they may as well have been standing on opposite sides of the room, or opposite ends of the earth. She remembered the glass of wine that he lifted to his lips as her mother wrapped her arms around herself, draining the last of the claret inside. There was a bottle on the countertop, and it was half empty. He held the only glass. 

She couldn’t remember his expression, or his voice, that night. Over time, she forgot the smell of his cologne, and the shade of his eyes, and the way that his stubble felt on her cheek when he hugged her. By the time she and her mother drove away from that house, neither of them knowing where they were going, or how long it would take, or how they would know when they got there, Chloe couldn’t remember the last time her father had hugged her. 

“Does Dad have blue eyes, too?” she asked her mother, one morning at breakfast, a few weeks after they arrived in Evergreen. When her mother blinked at her, the question seeming to startle her like a gunshot, Chloe shrugged, looking down at her half-eaten bowl of cereal, a coil of guilt settling in her stomach, although she wasn’t certain why. “We were talking about genes in class yesterday.”

Her mother cleared her throat, turned her coffee mug so that the handle faced the opposite direction, and then shook her head.

“No,” she said, quietly. “He has green eyes.”

Chloe tried not to ask her mother questions about her father, after that. 

He wasn’t in any of the photos that her mother set out in frames around the house over time, a gradual spread of personality and colour as she settled into her job and they became more and more firmly rooted in the town. It would be some time before her mother felt comfortable enough to entertain even friends from work – the little cottage that they rented in the shadow of the hill was a long, long way from the two-storey home she had grown up in, with bay windows in the kitchen, polished stone floors in the foyer and a pool in the lush back garden – but with each pay-cheque from her new job, and after the divorce settlement was finalised, her mother committed to making the small home theirs. 

At first, she put out mostly photographs of Chloe – a beaming little girl in pretty party dresses and buckle shoes, a tiny baby swaddled all in snow white with huge blue eyes rimmed with long dark eyelashes, a squealing little ragamuffin running from the waves at the beach, a plastic spade in one hand and a water-filled pail in the other, sunglasses in the shape of love-hearts perched on her little button nose. Later came wedding photos, her mother and Radic and Chloe in her flower-girl dress, wearing a corsage that matched her mother’s bouquet. Sometimes, when Chloe looked at them, she thought she could see parts of her father in Radic; the dark, greying hair, the line of his jaw, the slight distance between his body and her mother’s in photographs. 

And then she had a baby sister on the way, and Chloe didn’t think about her father much anymore. 

Even when her belly was so round and full that Chloe sometimes thought that it looked like it might burst, especially when her baby sister moved around inside, so big that her heels and elbows were visible moving and pressing beneath the surface, her mother continued working full time as long as she could, and came home exhausted at the end of the day. Chloe tried to help her with her jobs at home, setting plates and cutlery on the table while her mother made dinner and Radic watched television in the den, emptying the washing machine when it played its janky little tune to signal that a load was finished and dragging over one of the lawn chairs to stand on and reach the line to peg it out, and making her own sandwiches and picking a piece of fruit in the morning to take to school. 

Even with her help, her mother was tired, often sitting on the edge of her bed and closing her eyes for a few minutes to rest, and Chloe tried not to make it any worse by coming home with scrapes that needed cleaning or cuts requiring a bandaid, or clothes torn and dirty and that would take her mother time and energy to clean and mend. She tried to keep her room tidy and help get ready for the baby. Sometimes it was good, and her mother smiled at her as they sat together on the sofa, folding pre-washed baby clothes, tiny little onesies and booties and hats. Other times, she just got in the way, and Radic snapped at her as she fumbled the plastic packet of nuts and screws for assembling the baby’s crib, which lay in pieces across the nursery floor.

“Louise, I swear to God,” he said through gritted teeth, snatching the packet from her hands. “You don’t get her out of my way right now…”

Her mother took Chloe by the shoulders, steered her quickly to the front door, and suggested that she go and play in the sunshine. 

Soon after that, the photo frames around the house were dominated by new baby photos, a tiny bundle of dark curls and deep blue eyes.

Although she tried not to be, Chloe was in the way more often than not. 

And she started thinking about her father again.

When she was in middle school, some of the other girls in her class had Facebook pages, and giggled over the messages that they received, sometimes from older boys at the school or around town, sometimes from complete strangers halfway across the world, complimenting them on their photos, gushing about how they looked like American movie stars. They set up group chats and used them to share gossip and rumours, to play pranks on kids they didn’t like and exchange jokes and ridicule about other students behind their backs. 

“I can’t find you on here,” the girl who sat in front of Chloe in homeroom said one morning, brandishing the phone her parents had bought her, her Facebook profile open on the screen, her profile photo a glossed-pout selfie that made her look about ten years older than she was. “You should add me.”

“Oh, I don’t have Facebook,” Chloe said as she set her backpack and her skateboard underneath her desk, offering an apologetic smile. The girl arched an eyebrow and looked at the friends sitting nearest her, all of whom mirrored her expression. Chloe bit her lip as the girl glanced down at her worn jeans and her banged-up sneakers where she propped them on the trucks of her skateboard, then raised a shoulder as she turned away. 

“Figures.”

That afternoon, before her mother got home from work, Chloe sat at the kitchen table and set up a Facebook profile. She took a mirror selfie in the cramped bathroom, pulling the kind of bratty face that the girls she knew wore in their profile photos, and uploaded it to her page. When she entered her school in the applicable field, a slew of suggested connections popped up, but Chloe hesitated to send any of them friend requests. 

She only really had one friend, and they didn’t use Facebook, either.

It didn’t matter, anyway, because creating a profile had been like opening herself up to some kind of hive mind. People she knew from school started adding her. First, some classmates she was familiar with, and the gossipy girls from her homeroom, and then people she didn’t know, really – older boys, sometimes siblings of kids in her classes, occasionally distant connections of connections, and Chloe left those requests unanswered, too scared and uncomfortable to accept but not bold enough to decline. 

She didn’t use the page for much, at first, other than scrolling through the posts of her classmates as if they were actually friends, looking at photos of parties she wasn’t invited to, popular kids shopping and sitting by their pools, sleeping over each other’s houses and hanging out with boys. It didn’t make her feel good, looking at all of those lives that seemed somehow better than her own, but it felt like a kind of compulsion, and she couldn’t seem to make herself look away, especially when the students around her sat at their desks, mindlessly flicking through screeds of photographs and thoughts and memes. 

Chloe was flicking absently through her feed, stirring a saucepan of white sauce with her spare hand while her mother tried to comfort a clingy, sobbing, feverish three-year-old Amelia and balance the kitchen phone between her shoulder and her ear, making a fifth call to Radic to see how much later he would be getting home for dinner, when she saw it.

**People You May Know**  
_Gavin Rice_  
_1 mutual friend_

Chloe glanced at her mother, who put the phone down sharply on the kitchen table when she got Radic’s voicemail again. Without looking at Chloe, she stepped out of the kitchen, shushing Amelia with a quiet, threadbare voice as she carried her down the hall toward her room to make another attempt at getting her down to sleep. Biting the inside of her lip, Chloe tapped on the profile photo, then locked the screen of her phone, focussing her attention on the overcooked white sauce she had been tasked with stirring. 

Later, after a tense and quiet dinner, which they had eaten mostly in silence, her mother eating one-handed with Amelia attached to her like a barnacle and Chloe chewing slowly to press down the grimace at the tasteless, overdone chicken, she pulled her blanket over her head – partly to muffle the sound of her mother and Radic, who had arrived just as they finished cleaning up, arguing over a soundtrack of snuffling, coughing and weeping from Amelia, and partly to hide the light from the screen of her phone – Chloe tapped in her passcode, and looked at her father’s profile photo.

He was both exactly what she remembered and nothing like she imagined. He had let his hair go a distinguished gunmetal grey, paler at the temples and silver peppering the neatly kept beard that he now wore. His eyes were green, just as her mother had said, and in the photograph, he was dressed in a royal blue polo shirt and held a young boy on his hip, wearing a Little Athletics uniform and a grin, clutching a fistful of winner’s ribbons. The boy had the same green eyes.

Chloe thought he looked about six – the age she had been the last time she saw her father. 

She was too afraid to send a friend request, equally terrified by the idea of it being accepted or rejected, and perhaps even more frightened that it would simply be ignored. They shared one mutual friend – her aunt and his sister, who had sent Chloe a friend request shortly after she had joined, but never contacted her other than to share _minion_ memes about day-drinking wine and political slogans from local conservative candidates that Chloe mostly disregarded. She navigated back to her father’s profile page from time to time. He seemed to be the typical middle-aged social media user – clearly unaware of how to limit access to his page, which allowed her to browse his posts and photographs unhindered, despite that they weren’t connected. 

It felt sort of voyeuristic, like she was peeping through a keyhole at something she had been specifically excluded from. There were photos of birthday parties and sports games, cook outs and golf days. There was a photograph of the sports car that her father bought Krysta for her thirtieth birthday. Chloe recognised the woman only vaguely from the days when she would offer her a sweet from the bowl that she kept on the corner of her desk when she visited her father’s office as a little girl. The woman looked a lot blonder and bustier than she remembered, the hand that brandished the keys adorned with freshly manicured nails a shade or two brighter than the ballet-slipper pink that had been her mother’s favourite. 

She learned that their son was named Hunter. He liked Avengers and Lego, baseball, dinosaurs, Pokemon and monster trucks. He had a brand name bicycle, and several scooters, but no skateboard. He played on sports teams and went to birthday parties at theme parks and was rarely photographed on his own, 

And as she flicked through posts and photo albums, her gaze lingering on each picture, Chloe realised that she was looking for something that wasn’t there. 

They were a picture-perfect family, bright white smiles, vacations, hobbies, celebrations and eating out, even a Beagle puppy under the tree one Christmas. 

She was looking for a hint, some suggestion of something absent, a clue that her father’s family, his life, was somehow incomplete.

But it wasn’t.

The one with a missing piece was her. 

Chloe stopped looking up her father’s profile after that. 

In Freshman year Business Studies, Ms Bergmoser showed them how to set up Linked In profiles, explaining the importance of building and marketing their _personal brand_ to ensure visibility with potential future employees and successful careers. Chloe found the exercise of describing her strengths and attributes awkward, but she had fun taking photographs of her classmates for their profile pictures, getting a kick out of styling them in suit jackets and ties borrowed from parents and older siblings, touching up their hair and makeup and choosing the best lighting and background in the room to snap their photo with the cameras she borrowed from her Photography class. She made a few connections just to demonstrate using the endorsement and reference functionalities for the purpose of the assignment, adding her mother and trying not to blush too deeply at the gushing testimonial she submitted.

“You know one day I’m going to have to delete that?” Chloe asked as she peeled carrots, glancing over her shoulder at her mother, who was tossing dressing through a green salad on the other side of the kitchen sink. “Colleges look at that stuff, and I don’t know if my ability to babysit Amelia or bake sugar cookies is the kind of endorsement the big schools are looking for.”

Her mother waved a hand, blowing a dismissive breath between her teeth.

“Babysitting shows responsibility and character,” she insisted, reaching for the pepper grinder. “And who doesn’t like sugar cookies?”

Chloe shook her head, but her cheek dimpled with a smile. 

Chloe scored well on the Linked In profile assignment, Ms Bergmoser praising her grasp of visual aesthetics and professional presentation. Afterwards, Chloe mostly forgot about it, until she slipped her phone from the top shelf of her locker after cheer practice a week before winter break in her sophomore year, and saw that she had received an email notification of a Linked In message from _Gavin Rice_ \- **CEO at Feldman and Rice Property Investments**.

Her heart flew into her throat, lodging there, and she clutched the phone to her chest as the other girls on the squad moved around her, chatting while they packed their bags and pulled on their Liberty Tigers windbreakers over their winter cheer uniforms before heading out. She waited until the locker room was quiet before lowering herself with shaking knees to sit on a bench, and clicked through to the message. 

_I hope it’s OK that I’m contacting you. I know it’s a bit out of the blue._

_I saw you had a Facebook page, but I don’t use Facebook much, and I know kids don’t like being friends with their parents on things like that. At least, that’s what Hunter tells me._

_I guess I just wanted to tell you that I saw your profile, and that you look like you’ve grown up to be a mature and beautiful young lady. I know I can’t claim any credit for that, but I wanted you to know that I was proud to see how well you’re doing._

_If you’re ever out near Monterey, let me know. Maybe we could meet up for coffee._

It had been almost ten years since that night in the kitchen, when she had watched her parents stand opposite one another as if leagues separated them. She hadn’t seen, spoken to, or heard from her father in that time. No cards or gifts for birthdays or Christmas, no phone calls to see how she was doing, no letters, no postcards, not even a text. 

And yet, sitting in the quiet locker room, Chloe wrapped her unsteady hands around her phone, closed her eyes, and smiled. 

~

Sheri wrote about Chloe’s relationship with her mother, the unique bond between them, forged strong by the hurt that they shared as the family and the life they had known broke apart around them, and they clung to one another all the more tightly to survive it. 

Justin wrote a technicolour fairy-tale about a tiny princess growing up believing she was unwanted by her father, only to find that he had been searching for her as long as she had him, and had loved and wanted her all along. When he read back through what he had written, he realised that he had referred to the princess as a prince a handful of times, and scribbled it out, noting the corrections in cramped letters in the margins. 

Only Monty knew the end of the story. 

He knew that, almost exactly a year ago, after exchanging sporadic, polite and slightly stilted messages over Linked In for over six months, Chloe’s dad shared an event invitation on his Linked In profile for an expo his firm would be attending, just under an hour’s drive from Evergreen. 

He knew that Chloe had agonised over reaching out to him, had redrafted the message about a thousand times before finally clenching her eyes closed, pressing ‘send’, and then slamming the lid of her laptop shut as the message confirmed as delivered. 

_Hi Dad. I saw you’ll be in East County on the 15th. I’d like to see you, if you would have time to meet up. Let me know._

He knew that it was the first time she had referred to him as ‘Dad’ since he had reached out to her. Mostly, they avoided referring to each other by any name, or signing off their messages with anything. 

He knew that she had almost made herself sick with dread and regret and anticipation, unable to sleep the entire night, her eyes dry and bloodshot with exhaustion when she clutched her phone the following morning and saw his response.

_Sure. The company is putting me up at the Hilton on Jones Street. My schedule is tight, but we could have breakfast before I head to the expo. I could meet you in the lobby, say 7.00am?_

He knew that Chloe had fretted almost as much over confirming as she had about contacting her father in the first place, and that excited tears had bloomed in her eyes when he responded to her confirmation with:

_Great. Looking forward to it._

He knew that Chloe hadn’t told her mother – about any of it, the initial Linked In message, the expo, the six months of messages back and forth with her father – so he had pretended to be Radic, and had a little more fun than Chloe had been comfortable with putting on the smarmiest slimeball voice he could manage to call out sick for her. He had left her at the bus stop that morning in a pretty floral blouse, pencil skirt and a petal-pink cardigan, her hair in perfect curls about her shoulders and her hands wringing together tightly.

He knew that she arrived early to the Hilton, and perched on the edge of an overstuffed armchair, waiting anxiously, gaze darting to the elevator every time the door slid open, looking for that expensive haircut, the sharply tailored jacket, those green eyes she barely remembered. 

He knew that she sat there as it ticked past seven. And then seven-thirty. And then eight-thirty, with no contact, and no sign of him. 

He knew that, at nine o’clock, Chloe had approached the hotel reception desk, chewing her lower lip anxiously, and asked if they would mind phoning up to his room to make sure that her father was alright. The receptionist had, with a very kind and proper voice, told her that he had checked out at 6.00am, and that he hadn’t left any messages for anyone, or mentioned expecting any guests or visitors, but offered to write down the address of the expo, a few blocks away. Chloe had smiled, very brightly, and shook her head. 

He knew that, on the bus ride back to Evergreen, she had stared at that last message from her father, and thought about what she wanted to say to him, and as the bus passed the county welcome sign out by Mercy Hospital, she had resolutely deleted her Linked In profile without saying anything at all. 

He ditched the rest of the afternoon, meeting her at the skate park at lunch. Chloe had changed into jeans and sneakers, but was still wearing the pretty floral blouse as she dragged her fingers through her perfect curls, scraping them into a careless knot at the crown of her head. When he offered her the flower he had climbed halfway over a stranger’s front gate to take on his way over, she had smiled sadly at the soft apricot bloom, and tucked it into the elastic at the base of her bun.

Monty wrote about two nameless little heathens, demons with scabbed knees and wild grins and burning embers for hearts, who skateboarded the suburban streets like terrors on the breeze, unbound and unseen by anyone but one another, untouched and unharmed by the world around them, safe and content together as the sun sank and, as the darkness rose, their elbows bumped one another’s arms and ribs comfortingly as they hopped off of their boards and walked the last few blocks home. 

A few nights later, after he finished scrawling out his story in untidy handwriting in his exercise book, Justin paused at the doorway to his bedroom, peering out into the living room. His mother looked peaceful, her breathing soft and shallow and her rumpled waitress uniform painted in the dim light of the television screen, but he knew the difference between sleep and nodding out. 

Watching her, Justin tipped his temple against the dinged wooden doorframe, and chose the story he would tell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poolhouse setting for this one is an expansion on one of Chloe's _dizzy_ descriptions, from Chapter 2 of Dizzy.
> 
> Thank you as always to [ closetfascination ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetfascination/pseuds/closetfascination) for the beta reading, encouragement and chats. If you're not already, you should check out her fics, especially [ Wake Up ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29346840/chapters/72084132), a canon-divergent reimagining starting at the end of S3. 
> 
> Next up is another set of mini-scenes, and then next will be Justin's family story, the setting for which will include not only the group project, but a group costume :)
> 
> Thank you for reading and commenting x


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